AA 2.0 file management utility - need testers!

Z

zenpicker

New member
All, I just posted a simple utility program aimed at simplifying management of obsolete WAVs in your Audition 2.0 project. It's just a little public domain thing and I'd love to have some people take it for a test drive (on a non-essential project, please). There are some folks on the AA forum (Adobe's) who are playing with it, but the more testers the better. I think it is a pretty useful thing.

If you care to check it out, please hit:

http://www.edwardhamlin.com/afc_download.shtml

Thanks!
 
timboZ said:
Cool, I will check it out as soon as I upgrade. (Its on the way)

You may want to send an Email over to Bruce at audio2u.com.
Also a post at http://www.audiomastersforum.org
Click to expand...

Good thoughts - I think I may wait until I get some more testing feedback before I put the word out to a wider audience. Some great ideas for enhancements have already bubbled up on the official Adobe forum. Chief one: ability to move files rather than just delete; my thought would be to give the option of moving them into a compressed archiving using the FLAC audio compression algorithm. I like that idea a lot and will do it when I can.
 
Just an update - someone on the Adobe forum tried it under 1.5 and it had trouble locating the last-saved project, a basic safety check it does. I know why it's happening and it's a simple fix, so I'll try to get that done over the weekend.

Will post here once there's an update ready.
 
Just posted an update to my Audio File Cleanup utility, still at the link referenced at the top of this thread. The update gives better feedback on disk space reclaimed and offers a Move as well as an Erase option for files.

Still no 1.5 support - will get to that.

In the mean time I have used the utility quite extensively, and it does work fine. Yesterday I reclaimed 1 gb+ with a few mouse clicks. Have at it!
 
This is interesting!
I use to go to windows search engine and search for "track".
In 99% cases it finds all my track1.1, track3.6 etc wav files.
Than, I mark them all and push delete.
I always make sure that all my USED track are saved with their new names like Vox1, guitar clean, guitar riff etc.

Someone asked about A A 1,5 but I don't think it saves all those files without asking you first.
 
Hold On!

I just noticed a glitch in the new release that could cause unwanted deletion of files. I've taken it down for the moment and will post a revised build shortly, but if you downloaded the version posted this morning, DO NOT USE IT. Sorry - just a stupid mistake, easily fixed.
 
OK - I have posted an update that warns you about a specific situation that can trip up the utility. Specifically, if you rename individual clips during a session, it appears that AA does not put a lock on them right away - an odd quirk - so the utility mistakenly thinks they're not in use. Saving the project, exiting AA and reloading the project takes care of it, but I see no way of making the utility smarter about it.

So all I've done is add some warnings about this situation just before you pull the trigger. Wish there were a clever way to read AA's mind, but apparently there is not.

Sorry for the scare - that's why we're in beta mode, so to speak.
 
Thank you, EH

I have downloaded it and will install it on my recording computer, which I recently upgraded to Audition 2.0. I haven't run 2.0 enough to get into problems with its behavior, but this will be a nice enhancement.
 
Enjoy - and feed me any suggestions you have. I want to get this little side project done and now's the time to tweak 'er. Or 'im. I don't know...
 
Interesting program. I have yet to try it, but I will soon enough.
Why is it that Audition saves so many unused .wav files?
Does it save all punch-ins and takes, even if you don't use them?
I noticed than now AA doesn't ask to save .wav files you deleto out of a session anymore. 90Z% of the time they're deleted because they are a bad take ot junk.

I have noticed AA2 uses a ton more space then CEP did.
 
I use AA 2.0.
I got it to work perfectly one time (on a particular song).
The next time I told Cleanup to move files on a different song (no files were "highlighted"). Cleanup moved all files (yes ALL, even in-use files) where I told it to, Audition still knew where they were located after the move as well.
The next time I loaded Cleanup, it saw no files (since the directory is now empty) so I pointed it to the directory where all the files were moved to. This time Cleanup did "highlight" the files in use.
I told Cleanup to move them, but I got "TProgressBar property out of range." pop-up box when I hit the Proceed to Process Files button. So I tried delete, and got the same error, so then I tried to reload AA & the Cleanup program and still got the problem.

Hopefully that is of some help. Maybe it's just a fluke. But still a great useful program.
I can see some great effort. Thanks! :D
 
I think I know why the folder showed up with no files highlighted.

As this is a Beta program I want to be sure that my audio is all OK without a doubt.

So the best way to do that was for me to create a copy of the folder containing the session/wav files.
When I open the copied session, The session loads the copied wav files too.
Cleanup will show no highlighted files, but if I point it to the original folder containing the original wav files it does highlight them.
So then I saved the copied version of the song and re-loaded Cleanup. This time cleanup saw the correct files in the copied fiolder that were in use and highlighted them.
Another way I got cleaner to recognise the correct wav files was by renaming the original folder.

Hopefully that all made sense.
 
Tarnation - thanks for the detailed testing feedback! This is really useful and exactly what I need to tighten the thing up.

I think your issue (besides the progress bar issue, which is just a dumb bug) probably relates to how AFC tries to figure out what's the current project. What it's doing is a little arcane because it can't directly "ask" AA that question. It looks for the last-SAVED project, which will not actually be updated until you do a normal exit from AA. That's why saving, exiting and reloading seems to have gotten it back in sync with where to look for project files. Then it double-checks the caption of AA's window to make sure that project name matches. A little indirect, but the best I could come up with short of knowing how to directly interact with AA. Knowing this, do your results make sense?

I think I may have figured out a way to extract referenced file names directly from the .ses file, which would allow opening of any project, whether loaded or not, and processing of its files. This would be cleaner for all kinds of reasons, one being that you would not be chained to the currently-loaded AA environment. In fact, AA would not need to be loaded at all. When I get a chance to fiddle with it I will see if I can make it work.

In the mean time I can at least take care of that little progress bar bug. Thanks again for the great feedback!

PS - probably better to email me when you post test results/feedback here, as I participate in a number of forums and may be slow in responding otherwise. Just use edward@edwardhamlin.com. Thx!
 
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