I really appreciate the import/export folder settings.

Not sure when that got added but I downloaded Audacity 3.0 and the addition of the import/export folders makes the whole program better.

It still seems to me that each track in the project should have memorized what format it came in from, and what file it came from and there should be either in the pull down menus or in the track right click menus, a way to save/update the file that audacity opened from.

Secondly, when exporting, there should be a way to actually go to the folder where the currently imported items came from.

Let’s suppose I have Ableton Live and I use it and register Audacity as a wav editor.

Or less exotically let’s suppose I use windows and I double click on .WAV and MP3 files in explorer and they open (import, actually) in Audacity.

Now, getting the content that was opened from C:\FOLDER1\FOLDER2\FOLDER3\FOLDER4\FOLDER5 back into that folder is an exercise in frustration as Audacity forgets where it imports from and doesn’t provide a simple workflow to export back to where you imported from, either with the same name or with a different name.

(The multi-export window is unfortunately, not capable of this.)

The new project format is much appreciated and seems more sanely constructed. I have not made much use of Audacity in the past because of how frustratingly it insisted that the only thing you can save is an Audacity Project and that a track is no longer aware of its own roots in a file on my disk, where I have mentally mapped it.

That is to say, Audacity and its developers models of how people use audio file editors diverge wildly from how I and some others have wished it viewed those processes.

This is quite a popular type of use case and is being considered by the developers.

Right. So without destroying any existing functionality, it seems to me that each track in the audacity in memory entities, let’s call it the “in memory project”, could remember what format the import last came from, and what file name and folder that import came from.

Since the existing practice is to call saving a wav file, exporting, all that’s needed is an EXPORt to existing format/file, where that’s known.

If I was coding it, I would provide a non-destructive save, via renaming a series of backup files.

Audacity is a lot like an IDE. The native format of the Visual Studio application is the IDE project. But it also lets you save each asset in that project, some are text files, and yet visual studio is not really a text editor. But it certainly is possible to right click helloworld.cpp, edit it and save it without saving a project, and without browsing directories or selecting if I want the text file saved as UCS3LE BOM, or UTF8, or ANSI.

Anyways I am a C++ dev with some wx experience (rusty), I am going to check the code out and have a poke around.