Merging 'Chain' and 'Export Multiple'

[Compositeur]

Audacity's File>Edit Chains feature, allows the user to apply multiple effects with customized settings, as well as 'Tracks' menu functions (e.g. Stereo-to-Mono), to a batch of sound files.

Audacity's File>Export Multiple feature enables common metadata to be inserted to a batch of sound files.

Is there a way of combining 'Chain' and 'Export Multiple', so that effects processing and common metadata allocation can all be done in one go, and if not, why not?

[steve]

Export Multiple is not currently supported by Chains.

Why?

The underlying mechanics of Chains is a simple list structure. It was originally introduced to provide automation for a specific task of cleaning up and compressing short speech files (part of a long abandoned "Clean Speech" project that one of the developers had a personal interest in).

Since that time, the Chains feature has been greatly expanded to support most effects, and a couple of additional export options, but it is still limited by the underlying linear "list" processing of single files or a linear chain of effects on the current project.

In order to support more advanced features such as editing with time selections, conditional processing, multi-file editing, recording, and so forth, requires a more flexible scripting system. The old "Chains" mechanism was never designed for the job, and frankly isn't up to the task. There is however a new scripting feature under development. It will probably be a few releases before this is ready for public release, but you can get a sneak preview of some of the work being done here: https://alphamanual.audacityteam.org/ma ... _Reference

[Compositeur]

Got it. Thanks again Steve.

For the moment I guess I'll just have to run the two batch processes separately.

All the best!