Re: Saving an AudioFile without an extension
Re: Saving an AudioFile without an extension
- Subject: Re: Saving an AudioFile without an extension
- From: Richard Dobson <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 15:13:14 +0100
It all comes down in the end to ther range of choices offered to users:
m wrote:
..
To wit: Digital Performer appends an ".L" or ".R" to files that
represent the left and right channels of a stereo pair. Running these
through your software (which would presumably insist on adding an
extension) would make Digital Performer unable to recognize these files
as the left and right channels of a pair.
So there remains the need to be able to create files without extensions,
and therefore _with_ file types.
Interesting. .L and .R are extensions, so I guess that does not conflict
with the guidelines! Looks like type/creator info can only describe so
much, and thereafter extensions are surprisingly useful - and this from
a major Mac software house. I don't have DP: is this approach confined
to SD2 files, or is it used with AIFF/WAVE formats too? How does it
label channels of a quad file? Are users permitted to change this
convention? I notice that the Apple-bundled app "Sound Studio" has this
option, but users are left to devise their own names for the two
channels, and on importing Dual Mono are free to select any pair of sd2
files they fancy; so is .L and .R a SD2 convention, or a DP convention?
There is of course no technical impediment any more to using multiple
dot-separated extensions: sfilename.L.sd2. It is simply a matter of
defining the convention.
And as far as I can see, there is no technical impediment to supporting
both Type/Creator and extensions when creating files: Audacity manages
this very well, all with a single Save dialog, though no doubt further
enhancements can yet be made. It is a cross-platform app however, and
also free, both of which may make it invalid in the eyes of committed
Mac users :-).
Far be from me to presume to challenge the status quo, but why do people
think that somehow offering the user the extended choice of filename
paradigm is so problematic? These would seem to be the choices for loading:
Type/Creator plus format extension (hidden or visible)
Type/Creator no extension
Plain file + extension
And for saving:
Type/Creator plus hidden format extension
Type/Creator plus visible format extension
Type/Creator no format extension (for backwards compatibility: the
only pattern deprecated in the guidelines)
All this needs is a control in the Save dialog (or alternatively buried
in Preferences) and users can save a file with exactly the naming
protocol they want, even adding .L and .R etc if they like. There is no
suggestion here of discarding the Type/Creator system, merely of adding
support for extensions. And it is the not so subtle hostility to file
extensions that surprises me, even though they do not threaten the
established hegemony of Type/Creator in any way. Is it perhaps more of a
"moral" issue than a mere technical one? Do format extensions not sit
well with "thinking differently"? Is it really that users don't like
them, or that users shouldn't like them?
Richard Dobson
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