Audacity Forum

Windows 7 Home; Audacity 2.0.5

I want to document exactly which effect changes I made during track mixing. Ideally, I should be able to view -> history and see all the information. However, that display doesn't seem to show (1) track number or (2) time selection for the effect.
ALSO ... and this is probably a bug ...
If I save a project (copying all files), exit Audacity, restart Audacity, open the project I just saved, the view -> history shows only "create new project". How can I view the history once I save an unfinished project, close my computer, and resume work the next day?

Thanks, -HM

The ability to Undo is not maintained after closing a project. Doing so would require that temporary audio data (potentially vast amounts) are saved indefinitely in the project folder, thus making Audacity projects (which are already pretty large) much bigger. Audacity has "unlimited" Undo levels, so projects could potentially grow to hundreds of GB, even if the actual amount of audio data is relatively small.

When working on complex projects I frequently use "Save Project As" (File menu) to create a series of "snapshots". This allows me to go back to a previous state even after closing the project.

@Steve ...

1. If I save a project "snapshot" isn't its history lost anyway when I open that snapshot?

2. In any case, shouldn't the viewable history include the track number(s) and the time-selection?. For example, if I amplify track #2 by +4db between times 1:00 and 1:15 ... I'd like to see that for later documentation. My situation is that I'm doing home-pc mixes of performance tracks so a sound engineer can prepare professional-quality, high-res material following my documentation.

3. I imagine this would involve serious coding, but ... wouldn't the size of a project be more efficient if its file contained the original tracks, and opening a saved project entailed executing the history as a command script against the original tracks?

Thanks,
-Herb

herb melrose wrote:1. If I save a project "snapshot" isn't its history lost anyway when I open that snapshot?

Yes, it's just a "snapshot".

herb melrose wrote:In any case, shouldn't the viewable history include the track number(s) and the time-selection?

That would be a feature request, so I'll move this to the "Adding Features" board.

herb melrose wrote: My situation is that I'm doing home-pc mixes of performance tracks so a sound engineer can prepare professional-quality, high-res material following my documentation.

I see. That makes it clear why it would be useful to you.
The only suggestion I can make is what I guess you are already doing, and that is to write down (pencil and paper) what you are doing as you go.

We already have a feature request to be able to export the text from the History window. Although this does not give you all the information that you want, it probably would cut down the amount of writing that you need to do, so please say if you'd like to vote for this feature (in addition to your specific request) and we will record your vote.

herb melrose wrote:I imagine this would involve serious coding, but ... wouldn't the size of a project be more efficient if its file contained the original tracks, and opening a saved project entailed executing the history as a command script against the original tracks?

Yes that would often make the project much smaller, but could make opening the project extremely slow if there are a lot of processes to apply. Some users have projects that are hours long and may have dozens of processes applied, each of which could take several minutes to apply.