Talk:Proposal Unitary Project

Gale: 28Apr11: I'm strongly in favour of a more "unitary" project format, though I am not sure about the details of presenting your scheme to the user. Is the user still opening the .aup? If so then when user does File > Open (Project), they will I assume never be able to see more than one .aup at a time, because each will be in its own folder. They will be able to see all the folders.

If we had a genuinely unitary format (somewhat like a .zip) that packed the project file and _data folder into a single entity, that would seem to me more robust and intuitive. How do other project-based apps handle making it harder to access the data?

Do we need the "Temporary Project" menu item? Why can't you just hit Record?

Not sure about "Close and Delete" either. We do want some safe way to let users rename and delete projects. My current thinking is a single menu item that leads to some kind of "Project Manager" or "Project Browser". See bug 136.

Bill03May2011: Regarding other project-based apps, iMovie and iDVD pull everything into one monolithic file e.g. myDVD.dvdproj. I have no idea what Apple does to make access to the data in those files easy to access and manipulate. OTOH Pro Tools uses a scheme almost identical to Audacity's. In Pro Tools (at least up to v6.x) you could not have a new untitled "session" (equivalent to an Audacity project) - you were forced to name it and save it. In the process Pro Tools would create folder with the same name as the session, then save the .pts file in that folder, and create in that folder two folders called "Audio Files" and "Fade Files". This is more in line with Steve's proposal, although I'd expect resistance to the notion of having to save a project before you can record into it. iMovie and iDVD are consumer apps, so it makes sense that Apple would make them as bullet-proof as possible. Pro Tools is (or was) targeted at professional users. The Pro Tools M-Powered series (bundled with M-Audio consumer interfaces) seems to do the same.

=Alternative Proposal transferred from the Forum=

*.aua File Format
The name is just a strawman exemplar. Koz Proposed: Photoshop has its PSD file format. You can save your work as MyPicture.psd and email it to someone and they can open it up and look at all your layers, formats, masks, channels, paths, etc. Audacity needs an .aua file format does does the same thing (I picked the letters out of a hat). Instead of trying to email an .aup file to someone, Audacity would have its own file format -- possibly based on a variant of FLAC -- and available under File > Save. AUP would be supported, but no longer generated. Steve:I've been wondering if the "unitary project format" could be something like an ISO or UDF format, but I don't really have sufficiently in-depth knowledge to form an opinion. Bruno:I don't it necessarily needs to be an ISO or UDF format, but I understand your idea of projects files being "embedded" inside some sort of "virtual disk image". There a few file systems that could be used for that. Compatibility among all the 3 platforms could be an issue though, unless all the libs and tools were already included with audacity. In linux virtually any kind of filesystem can be mount as a loop device, ie, you can make a raw copy of a disk into a file and then mount that file as if it was a real disk (you use the loop module for that). In terms of performance I'm not sure how much that would cost us... maybe too much... maybe not... I haven't done any recent performance tests on loop devices... Could there be big differences between different platforms... Bruno:One option that could probably be easily done would be an "export project as zip" feature. And also an equivalent "import project from zip". AUP would be supported, but no longer generated. Koz: The goal is to avoid this. Saving a Project in its current form is an Advanced Production function for use by people putting together the Academy Award® show sound track, not somebody with simple, 40 minute lectures like this user. Somebody complaining that the .aua file is awkward and slow can be introduced to the brittle .aup file format and its associated /data folders and high speed, efficient long show production. Aup should not be the default save format. Please note that the .aua format can be saved as a Classic Project by simple loading and saving. Further, .aua is not subject to file splitting and scattershot data wounds that long format Projects are. .aua will save large, complex, multi-track productions uncompressed, and remember, the base format is FLAC. Audacity core doesn't change. Bruno: One other thing that could be done was changing the way the aup and the data files are stored... On the save dialog when the user is asked for the file name, instead of a file name that could be a dir name... Then Audacity would create a directory with the name specified by the user and the .aup file would go inside that folder among with the data folders and tiny audio files. Instead of the .aup having the name of the project it could be a standard name always the same for all projects. You could even change the extension from .aup to .xml and it would go like metadata.xml or projectinfo.xml or similar. That way the user wouldn't get so confused... He'd know that and audacity project is a folder containing many files... Steve: The main question there is how to achieve a unified project format without incurring a performance penalty. I don't think that a solution that involved "unpacking" a project into temporary files would be acceptable as large projects would then require a lot more disk space. Audacity would need to be able to work directly on the project.