Scripting to compress sessions?

[LowBassDub]

Debian Stable - Audacity 2.0.1 & Win XP - Audacity 1.3.14-beta

I have a lot of lossless 24-bit sessions on my windows machine, that I will be copying off to an external drive, but I wondered if anyone has scripted a way to go through a number of Audacity sessions, and convert them to the compressed OGG sessions instead?

That way I could hook the external drive up to my Linux box, have it make compressed versions of the sessions, and copy the compressed sessions back to the Winbox for reference. Rather than open each one, resave it, somewhere else, with a different name, etc. etc.

[steve]

If you want to work on them again later it would be better to keep them in a lossless format, so perhaps you could just 7-Zip them.
If you are not intending to work on them again, it would be much better to just export each project in your preferred format.

Audacity does not itself support scripting for projects, though I have found Actionaz quite easy to use with Audacity. https://wiki.actiona.tools/doku.php?id=en:start

[LowBassDub]

Didn't quite explain my self there.

I'm keeping the lossless files on an external drive. This does not stay attached to either machine.

I want to make OGG copies to put back on the Windows machine for reference, I suppose I could just make MP3's, but I find the multitracks more useful, if I need the lossless files, I pull them back off the external drive.

I'd thought maybe I could just run some script on my linux machine, but I don't know enough about the Audacity session files and data file formats to code it myself, something with perl, sox and oggenc I'd guess

[steve]

I'd thought maybe I could just run some script on my linux machine, but I don't know enough about the Audacity session files and data file formats to code it myself, something with perl, sox and oggenc I'd guess

It's not that simple. Audacity projects are complex data structures. To convert a project to compressed project format you would need the script to correctly parse the AUP file (XML format) so as to reconstruct the audio tracks so that the tracks can be encoded. Try opening an AUP file in a text editor to see what the structure of an Audacity project looks like.

[LowBassDub]

I'm right in thinking that there is no Undo info in a session file, it's all the audio as-is at the time of saving?

[steve]

Yes that's correct.