Proposal: add a new Tracks menu command for rendering tracks

Proposal pages help us get from feature requests into actual plans. This page is a proposal to add a new Tracks menu command for rendering tracks without miximg them.

Proposal pages are used on an ongoing basis by the Audacity development team and are open to edits from visitors to the wiki. They are a good way to get community feedback on a proposal.

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The Problem

As of now we only have the Tracks > Mix > Mix & Render command (and its related associates). There is no command for just rendering a selected group of tracks.

This leads to a couple of problems:

1. The user wishing to use just rendering has to do this one track at a time, select track then Mix&Render, repeat till done - tedious if you have a lot of tracks
2. When Audacity Mixes&Renders a track like this it does not leave it in place in the project but unnecessarily puts the "mix" at the bottom of the project - see Bug #2214 "Rendering a single track unnecessarily moves the track to project bottom and loses its properties"
3. This move of the mixed&rendered single track to the bottom can destroy its membership of a sync-locked track group.

Proposed Feature

Add a new command to the Tracks menu to work on selected tracks: Tracks > Render

Developer/QA Backing

• Robert
• Peter

Use Cases

Use Case-1: many tracks to be rendered - must be worked on very tediously one at a time.

Use Case-2: synchronicity loss

1. create an audio track
2. add a label track below it
3. turn on sync-lock
4. select the audio track
5. Tracks > Mix > Mix and Render
6. Observe the audio track is moved to the bottom and thus loses its membership of the SLTG

This is a trivial example, but in a large multi-track project this could be serious for the user.

Details

1. Add a new command to the Tracks menu to work on selected tracks: Tracks > Render.
2. The command renders each track (Pan, Gain, Envelope) in turn leaving in its original position and retaining its properties:
   • it remains selected,
   • it retains its display view: Waveform, Waveform (dB), Spectrogram,
   • it retains the user's chosen waveform colorway,
   • it retains Format and Rate,
   • But Gain and Pan sliders are reset as a result of the render.
3. Mix and Render command to be changed so that it can only operate on multiple tracks, not single tracks.
4. Mix and Render to New Track command to be changed so that it can only operate on multiple tracks, not single tracks.

This proposal would fix Bug #2214.

GUI Examples

None required.

Previous Feature Requests relating to this proposal

None