manage my media files better / don't litter the hard drive
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jokosher |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Jokosher should be smarter about managing the sound audio files in a project folder. Current problems:
1- it does not delete files, ever.
Solution: when exiting a project, it should show a dialog saying that "file X and Y are in your project media, but they are not used in the project. Do you want to delete them?" with a button to play/preview the files if needed.
2 - it does not check for duplicates when importing. So if I import foo.mp3 into the project, remove the instrument, then import it again, each time, a new file will be created in the project's audio folder. Even if it is 100% the same file!
Solution: check for a file's fingerprint (with md5sum or whatever fast algorithm there is out there) when importing it and use the existing version instead? If the fingerprints don't match, *then* you can import it alongside the existing version. And if we end up with duplicates, the solution of problem #1 comes in and saves the day.
| Laszlo Pandy (laszlok) wrote | #1 |
Yup #2 is a really good idea.
But I don't think we want to do #1. If we delete the files, then we have to delete all of the user's undo history because
a) if the user deleted that audio from the timeline in the past it wouldn't work when we restored it, and
b) most undo operations are dependent on the operation that comes before, so we can't delete undo operations one at a time (plus it would be confusing if we did).
Certainly asking the user to delete unused things every time they close is far too annoying. To me this is like asking the user to remove unused shortcuts and empty the trash every time they logout. Many years ago there was discussion around an option I put in to purge the undo stack. The consensus was that this is really not something the user should have to worry about and its even less concerning now that available hard drive space is not usually an issue.
We also did plan to put in some project export options, for example bundling up your project to give to a friend. This would have options to remove unused data and compress and tar up the project for easy sharing. That hasn't been implemented yet, but it probably should be.