Export of File and Export folder.

[gworley]

I am having an issue with Audacity 2.x -- I have had it for a long time.

The issue is -- the export folder.

• 1. Open MP3 up in Audacity
  2. do my edit whatever it may be
  3. Export Edits to MP3
  4. Save folder is the previous save not the folder where I opened up the MP3. I would like the export folder to be where the opened MP3 came from not the previous file edited. It takes a lot of time to navigate to the folder where the file that I am editing game from... in addition to the main internal hard drive, I have 5 external drives plus 2 NAS drives that I have music stored on.

I don't see anything setting that would relate to this. Can someone help me? Thank you in advance

George

[Gale Andrews]

I am having an issue with Audacity 2.x -- I have had it for a long time.

Then please update to 2.0.5 from http://audacityteam.org/download/windows - although it won't help your issue.

Also next time please give all three numbers of the Audacity version you have so that it is unambiguous - see the pink panel above.

The issue is -- the export folder.

• 1. Open MP3 up in Audacity
  2. do my edit whatever it may be
  3. Export Edits to MP3
  4. Save folder is the previous save not the folder where I opened up the MP3. I would like the export folder to be where the opened MP3 came from not the previous file edited. It takes a lot of time to navigate to the folder where the file that I am editing game from... in addition to the main internal hard drive, I have 5 external drives plus 2 NAS drives that I have music stored on.

I don't see anything setting that would relate to this. Can someone help me?

Sorry, but Audacity can't do that. It's a long standing feature request. We tried implementing this but dragging files in would not modify the export path. Edgar here has a custom Audacity build that I understand might do what you want. I'll ask him to look in here, but if you used his build you would no longer be using official Audacity.

I'll add your vote for this feature.

Otherwise, the only slight panacea I can think of is to use Places Bar Editor to set some of your common file locations to the "Places" on the left of the standard file open dialogue. However you will then see them in file open dialogues in other programs too, if they use the standard Windows dialogue.


Gale

[Edgar]

You may download a Windows 7/8-only version of a customized Audacity 2.0.3 here:
http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... er2013.zip
The documentation is here:
http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... ation2.zip
It has the "Smart Folders" feature you describe. There are a number of good reasons why the Audacity Development Team has not implemented this feature.

[Gale Andrews]

You may download a Windows 7/8-only version of a customized Audacity 2.0.3 here:
http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... er2013.zip.

That zip appears to be corrupted - I haven't managed to open it.


Gale

[Gale Andrews]

You may download a Windows 7/8-only version of a customized Audacity 2.0.3 here:
http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... er2013.zip

I got your http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... oPlus2.zip .

I didn't realise the switching of the export folder to that last imported/opened from was in that version, so I tried it. A very desirable feature I think, especially when dragging in also switches the folder. I can already think of an enhancement option for it - don't make it per project, so that if importing from folder A into Project A then from folder B into Project B, exporting from Project A opens the export dialogue at folder B.

Remind me - what else than the need for code refactoring stands in the way of this folder-switching? Is it dependent on the Windows 7 Open/Save dialogue?

Do you know why we don't we use that newer dialogue now for the relevant WinNT versions? It doesn't seem to have any bugs when you navigate to another folder.

Other comments on this build:

• I changed the "Unselected Peak" background colour but this made the Selection Toolbar TimeText controls just a small "bump" where the controls should have been.
• The Manage .cfg feature in Preferences is nice. With the save and load feature included, that would make we want to release that feature, though I would not force user to restart on reset, just reset when user restarts anyway. Even with that GUI reset, we still need a cross platform "easy reset" solution for when you cannot launch Audacity.

Anyway, if we want to revisit discussion of that reset feature, it should be another topic.


Gale

[Edgar]

I got your http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... oPlus2.zip .

That's comforting! BTW that version has an undocumented feature (or bug): new project window cascading/marching has been turned off – all new project windows open at the same size and location as the active project window. I have a new build which has not yet been delivered to the client which turns this feature back on and back ports a small handful of 2.0.6 bug fixes. I am thinking about making this a preference.

I didn't realise the switching of the export folder to that last imported/opened from was in that version, so I tried it. A very desirable feature I think, especially when dragging in also switches the folder. I can already think of an enhancement option for it - don't make it per project, so that if importing from folder A into Project A then from folder B into Project B, exporting from Project A opens the export dialogue at folder B.

This would require some thought; what happens if you Import from folder A into Project A then import from folder B into Project B and then import from folder C into Project C – and you want the dialog to open in folder B? This is almost* the exact dilemma the client brought me; initially I had it working the way I liked it, the client had me change it after internal beta testing then, after release, got enough feedback from users to have me change it back the way I originally had it. I set up the code so that a preference switch would be trivial but the client chose not to use a preference switch.
*This was actually in regard to multiple imports into a single Project but the dilemma remains the same.

Remind me - what else than the need for code refactoring stands in the way of this folder-switching? Is it dependent on the Windows 7 Open/Save dialogue?

The folder-switching code (the client calls this "Smart Folders"), excluding some similar code I have added to Export Multiple, is fairly simple as it exists now; each project has its own new variable which stores the Import folder's complete path (deriving this path can get tricky on Windows), each of the three places where the code Imports needs to have a few identical lines to derive and store this path information. At some point the Developers plan on re-factoring the Import code so that instead of three almost identical sections of Import code there is only one.

Do you know why we don't we use that newer dialogue now for the relevant WinNT versions? It doesn't seem to have any bugs when you navigate to another folder.

That newer dialog only exists on Vista service pack 2 and newer Windows; It is easy to determine if we are on Vista or Windows 7 but it is very difficult to programmatically determine the difference between Vista service pack 1 and Vista service pack 2. There is a huge amount of new code added to the current Audacity code base in order to implement the newer dialog

I changed the "Unselected Peak" background colour but this made the Selection Toolbar TimeText controls just a small "bump" where the controls should have been.

I have fixed this. Vaguely, what is happening is that the default Selection Toolbar TimeText controls end up storing a system default font size which is very tiny and makes the controls very small. The fix was to force the TimeText to have a reasonable default font size.

[Gale Andrews]

I didn't realise the switching of the export folder to that last imported/opened from was in that version, so I tried it. A very desirable feature I think, especially when dragging in also switches the folder. I can already think of an enhancement option for it - don't make it per project, so that if importing from folder A into Project A then from folder B into Project B, exporting from Project A opens the export dialogue at folder B.

This would require some thought; what happens if you Import from folder A into Project A then import from folder B into Project B and then import from folder C into Project C – and you want the dialog to open in folder B? This is almost* the exact dilemma the client brought me; initially I had it working the way I liked it, the client had me change it after internal beta testing then, after release, got enough feedback from users to have me change it back the way I originally had it. I set up the code so that a preference switch would be trivial but the client chose not to use a preference switch.
*This was actually in regard to multiple imports into a single Project but the dilemma remains the same.

If there is an option then I guess there could be as many choices for the option as you want, but a choice of "use folder for last import in the session" or "last import in the project" seems useful to me. It could be extended to "use folder for first import in the session" or "first import in the project".

Beyond that, I guess you would want to some way to select a track and choose "Export to folder this file came from". I'm not promoting that as important for release though.

Do you know why we don't we use that newer dialogue now for the relevant WinNT versions? It doesn't seem to have any bugs when you navigate to another folder.

That newer dialog only exists on Vista service pack 2 and newer Windows; It is easy to determine if we are on Vista or Windows 7 but it is very difficult to programmatically determine the difference between Vista service pack 1 and Vista service pack 2. There is a huge amount of new code added to the current Audacity code base in order to implement the newer dialog

Yes I understand that we stopped using the new dialogue for file saving from 1.3.3 onwards because we added the "Options..." button into the dialogue.

Audacity continued to use the new dialogue for import/open until 1.3.6, so did we go back to the old dialogue there just for "consistency" of the dialogues?

And so I'm clear, we could use the old dialogues for the "Smart Folders" feature?



Gale

[gworley]

I am having an issue with Audacity 2.x -- I have had it for a long time.

Then please update to 2.0.5 from http://audacityteam.org/download/windows - although it won't help your issue.

Also next time please give all three numbers of the Audacity version you have so that it is unambiguous - see the pink panel above.

I know it wont because I am running the latest version. I posted here because I knew the version that I was running was within the framework. I should have included it. sorry!

The issue is -- the export folder.

• 1. Open MP3 up in Audacity
  2. do my edit whatever it may be
  3. Export Edits to MP3
  4. Save folder is the previous save not the folder where I opened up the MP3. I would like the export folder to be where the opened MP3 came from not the previous file edited. It takes a lot of time to navigate to the folder where the file that I am editing game from... in addition to the main internal hard drive, I have 5 external drives plus 2 NAS drives that I have music stored on.

I don't see anything setting that would relate to this. Can someone help me?

Sorry, but Audacity can't do that. It's a long standing feature request. We tried implementing this but dragging files in would not modify the export path. Edgar here has a custom Audacity build that I understand might do what you want. I'll ask him to look in here, but if you used his build you would no longer be using official Audacity.

I have right click context menu for MP3 setup so that it is pointing to Audacity to edit the file. It would be so easy to pass the directory as the working directory to Audacity at point but there isn't much that can be passed from the command line currently.

I'll add your vote for this feature.

Thanks...

Otherwise, the only slight panacea I can think of is to use Places Bar Editor to set some of your common file locations to the "Places" on the left of the standard file open dialogue. However you will then see them in file open dialogues in other programs too, if they use the standard Windows dialogue.

The issue here is that there are no real common "places" as tracts are stored in the following order -- artistalbumtrack*.mp3 -- they are stored locally with backups on the NAS drives.

George

[gworley]

You may download a Windows 7/8-only version of a customized Audacity 2.0.3 here:
http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... er2013.zip

File is corrupt cannot open with Winzip nor command line unzip nor any other unzip utility.

It has the "Smart Folders" feature you describe. There are a number of good reasons why the Audacity Development Team has not implemented this feature.

I am not sure the reasons behind this -- if I am editing a file as because there is a "bad" spot usually from the conversion process from WMA or ACC so that I can play on my IPOD. Sometimes there is a portion that is looped that should not have been looped in the process. I paid for sound editor that now I cannot run because the company sold it to Adobe and now have total abandoned their clients that was using it prior to the sell-out. Any Audacity is so much better. The "workaround" for me is to capture the path from the explorer window and paste it before the file name. Of course Audacity asks me if I want to overwrite it. I also have to save the album art by copying then pasting from within iTunes.

Personally I think that Audacity needs be able to have the current directory pass to it as the working directory for the opened file. I have setup Audacity to be available through the Windows context menu.

George

[Gale Andrews]

I have right click context menu for MP3 setup so that it is pointing to Audacity to edit the file. It would be so easy to pass the directory as the working directory to Audacity at point but there isn't much that can be passed from the command line currently.

We need a complete solution for all scenarios, dragging in a file being the one that is "hard", because dragging in bypasses the file open dialogue routines.

Did you try http://www.hometownband.org/members/efm ... oPlus2.zip ?

I also have to save the album art by copying then pasting from within iTunes.

Can we add your vote that we fix that too?


Gale