Audacity Forum

How do you guys work around not being able to save this history when closing/saving a project that is in progress?

Tell us how you would like to work around it then we can count your "vote".

Is it only the list of actions that you need from the last session? Or do you want to go back to a project state in the last session? That needs a lot of data to be stored on your computer.


Gale

Thanks Gale.
Data storage isn't a big deal nowadays, an external terabyte Hard Drive doesn't cost that much.

I'd like to reload the last session exactly as it was before saving.

But being realistic in the meantime I'd guess only a few feature requests make it so I was also wondering what practice users adopted in the absence of this feature.

I find myself duplicating embellishment tracks a lot with various stages of effects applied or ctrl/shift/M mix overdubs to tracks whilst retaining the original individual tracks in case I question my nightime judgment the morning after

But then it all gets a bit messy with a huge amount of tracks to navigate.

You could perhaps save alternative mixes or effect attempts as a different project (File > Save Project As... ). Note this leaves you with the newly named project that you "saved as" open, its history including the states it had when it had its original name.

The project with the original name closes in the state it was last saved in, and of course loses its history.

You would have to try it out to see if it helped.


Gale

I'll try that Gale.

I suppose I'm doing something similar in that I'm currently experimenting with opening a new project and copying selected tracks into it to play around with

I have a basic ryhthm'/outline track mix that is loaded into both to get approx levels

Another way I'm going to try is to export selected tracks as wavs for backups. I just found out that generating a small portion of silence from zero retains the white space before an instrument comes in.

Tapehead wrote:I just found out that generating a small portion of silence from zero retains the white space before an instrument comes in.

Yes, that's another feature request (if you want to make it) that there should be a choice at export time to include leading white space as silence.


Gale

Yes I'd vote for that.

OK I will count your votes for those two features.


Gale

Thanks Gale.

I'm still interested in how Audacity users work with absence of the undo/redo history after saving a project.

Similar to you I think.

1) Regularly "Save Project As..." and give it a name in the form "name-of-project001", "name-of-project002", "name-of-project003", ...
Save alternative versions as "name-of-project-023", "name-of-project-023b", "name-of-project-023c", ...

2) Before modifying a track, make a duplicate of the track, Move the duplicate to the top of the project window and give it a meaningful name. Then mute and "collapse" the track.

3) Where possible, use "wet" and "dry" tracks for effects. For example, if applying reverb; duplicate the track and apply reverb "wet only" to the duplicate track. I can then adjust the wet/dry mix at any time (even while playing the tracks) by adjusting the track "Gain" sliders.

4) On larger project, work in sections. Have a separate folder for each section within an overall "name-of-project" folder, plus one extra folder for "Full-Mix".
The directory structure might look something like :