What is Automation ?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I want to write a script/program that will:

  1. Accept a a large set of audio files
  2. Convert to specific format (from .m4a to .mp3)
  3. Edit meta data
  4. Rename
  5. And save to loc.
    Kindly point me to appropriate language, libraries and API I need to do this through audacity

Thanks in advance

2

Audacity’s version of automation is called chains.
I don’t think Chains can deal with MetaData, [Maybe MP3 tag can do #3].

SoX is worth looking at for batch-processing.

3

Command line encoders that may be used in scripts:

SoX: http://sox.sourceforge.net/
FFmpeg: https://www.ffmpeg.org/
LAME: http://lame.sourceforge.net/

GUI applications that can batch convert (these will not do all of the things that you list, but I don’t know any program that can):

Audacity “Chains”: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/chains_for_batch_processing_and_effects_automation.html
Foobar 2000: https://www.foobar2000.org/
VLC: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

4

A quick forum note.

What is Automation ?

You should pick a title that describes what you want to do, such as “Help me write a script” or “Help me automate a process.”

“What is Automation” appears to be the lead title for an advert or a message trying to sell us something. Advertising is strictly forbidden on the forum. An elf reads everything, so it turns out you just wanted automation help, but it did cause a little concern there for a minute.

Thank you for your clear question once you got there.

Koz

5

Just FYI - In audio production/mixing [u]Automation[/u] has a different meaning - It means automatically making adjustments, such as turning-up the guitar during the guitar solo or fading-up the reverb during part of the song, etc. In the “big studios” the faders on the mixer are actually motorized, but more commonly (even in the big studios) it’s done entirely in software.

Before automation the mixing engineer would sometimes enlist the help of one or more assistants (giving them specific instructions) if they didn’t have enough hands/fingers to handle all of the faders at once.

Audacity has an [u]Envelope Tool[/u] which is a kind of volume-automation.