Dragging and dropping a file into Audacity in Windows locks up Explorer

[kuchikirukia]

Windows 10: Drag and drop a file into Audacity and it's locked up until it's done loading.

That shouldn't happen.

[steve]

Which version of Audacity?
How many cores does your CPU have?

[kuchikirukia]

2.3.1

4 core/8 thread i7 4790.

It does this:

https://i.postimg.cc/tC8QSr9d/1.png
https://i.postimg.cc/T3m8ZrPz/2.png

I'm using Clover to add tabs to Explorer.

[steve]

Windows 10: Drag and drop a file into Audacity and it's locked up until it's done loading.

What's "locked up", Audacity or something else?
What exactly do you mean by "locked up"?

[kuchikirukia]

Nothing can be done in that Explorer tab until the file is done loading. No files can be selected/opened in Explorer and the "move" icon of the drag-and drop stays in the front of every window.

Just installed 2.3.2 and it's the same there as well.

[steve]

That's because the thread is busy.
If you need to use the file browser while Audacity is reading a file, open a new file browser window "in a new process" before you start the import. The window that you dragged from will still be busy, but the new window will still be usable (because it's running as a separate process).

[kuchikirukia]

Why is Audacity the only program that acts this way? I can drag and drop into Aegisub without this issue.

[kozikowski]

Why is Audacity the only program that acts this way?

Because it's the only one that's not a corporation. Audacity is produced to work on plain versions of each of three operating systems by a limited development staff. If you have a unicorn in one of those three, then you may get odd results.

Koz

[kuchikirukia]

Aegisub isn't a corporation and is multiplatform. It's free and open source so you can look to see how they do it. It seems to open new msvcr120.dll processes.

I can drag and drop into a ffmpeg output.wav batch file and it doesn't lock up, so if you're using ffmpeg to convert it doesn't seem like this should be insurmountable.

[steve]

Why is Audacity the only program that acts this way?

My guess would be that that wxWidgets is using the native file browser process to read the file, rather than using the file browser to pass only the name and location of the selected file, AND, the file browser in Windows 10 only runs a single thread unless you create a new window as a new process. I normally use Thunar file browser on Linux, which does not have this problem, so I'm not able to test.

Is this actually a "problem" for you, or are you just curious about why you see this behaviour?