newbie at automation

[CutUpSound]

I have 1.3.14-beta and have been using Audacity for a few months, mixing audio bits for a website.
Now I want to automate routine cutup tasks. For example: clip audio files, rearrange the clips in random order, and play back.
Questions:
- is there an outline of general Audacity programming concepts for beginners? (I've done Basic and Cobol, which gives you an idea of how long ago it was.)
- tutorial covering a project like my example (for example)?
- can you point me to good spots in the manual?
- would a chain do this?
- would AutoIt do this? (Is it worth installing?)

Thx.

[kozikowski]

Chains is the Audacity batch service. Each tool available in Batch has to be written specifically to do that, so it's a long painful process and only a limited number of tools is enabled. I don't think there is a randomizer, so that would be the first problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jrqa876HJg
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Edit_Chains

Koz