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Question: How is it that It's not possible to edit an audio file in another program while the file is open in almost any modern daw, reaper included. As a streamlined workflow including a distructive wave editor and a sequencer is such an obvious necessity. or in another words why DAWs need to lock access to the files by other programs? even in case of reaper it requires reaper playback to stop in order to be able to save the file in third party audio editors.
Asked by Milad (95.222.238.x) on December 11 2018, 12:21pm
Reply on December 12 2018, 2:14am:

It's complicated, some of it is OS-driven, but allowing other programs to write to files out from under you would be bad, then when things went wrong you'd get blamed.

Comments:

Posted by Milad (95.222.238.x) on December 12 2018, 11:26am:
I think here i would fall into the feature request pit and I know this is not the place for it. But we and some of my friends are still tied to Logic because it does't lock file access, you can get a loop running in logic and then start editing the loop elements in SoundForge in a Dosbox running win 3.1. and that's the only reason I could never leave logic to reaper or simply any other DAW. it can simply be an option at least.

Posted by EvilDragon (141.138.35.x) on December 18 2018, 7:01am:
But Reaper CAN edit files in external editors just fine... It does have an option. Preferences->Editing Behavior->[x] Set media items offline when application is not active.

Posted by Milad (95.222.238.x) on December 19 2018, 2:35am:
You haven't read my question and the comment properly or if you have you haven't understood it.

Posted by Justin on December 19 2018, 8:21pm:
I think part of the issue is that if you allow other applications to update the file, there's no guarantee they won't change the structure of the file, and to have to constantly check the file for major changes would be a lot of overhead. EvilDragon's point is that REAPER will by default set media offline when stopped and you switch away, to allow other programs to update the files. Then, when you return to REAPER, it sets the media back online, reparsing the file(s) as necessary. Which doesn't address your issue, but is also a limitation you'll have to accept.

Posted by Milad (95.222.238.x) on December 20 2018, 1:26pm:
That's the trick, You don't have to constantely check for major file changes, you set a timer that listens for the "date modified" events/changes in files every second or something, then update the file only when a change happens. I don't really know what is logic's approach for updating files. but I'm already writing a script for renoise in Lua that does exacxtly that. forum.renoise.com/index.php/topic/...

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