usability review of the mixdown process

Excellent excellent work. You are on fire with the bug reporting today.

We have been intending to replace this dialog for a long time, but it hasn't been done yet because it would be a bit of work to make is really simple and just as flexible. This dialog was designed from a really high level, without a whole lot of attention to detail. It was designed for flexibility, and now serves as a very good example of a much too general solution.

The original idea was to allow extension developers and users to easily extend this dialog. In its current form with two types of extension actions (one which is rarely used) it is pretty useless. If someone can propose some ideas for how to streamline this dialog for the use case of simply exporting to mp3/ogg/flac/wav and still have the flexibility for extra actions this would be great. If not, I vote we just scrap it and put in a Save As dialog with an extra combobox to select format type. Comments?

Well, for the KISS principle, I would be in favor of just scrapping it
and making a save dialog that asks for the format type. I can easily
design glade mockups if you need usability assistance on that front, but
then, I tend to agree that this dialog as it is now has been
overengineered :)

Ps: I've read another bug report that basically said mixdown was a weird
term. Have you considered something more general such as "export"?

"Mixdown" is a term used by Jono Bacon. I don't think he invented it, but I agree its not the most common. The only issue with the term export is it can also refer to saving the project in a different file format. For example we have considered allowing Jokosher to export your project to a single file (basically just a tarball) so you can easily send it to your friend. Say for example we got the ability to save in Audacity project format, that would be what I call "Export".

However no other file formats have been implemented yet, and won't be in the foreseeable future so I have no problem just using export to refer to rendering to a single audio file.

In terms of making the mix down dialog better for simple uses I'd thought of perhaps adding an "Always ask me where to save this file" option to the current "Save to Local/Remote" options, then providing 3 mixdown profiles by default (Ogg, Mp3, Flac) that make use of this option. So the user can just go to "Mixdown As -> Flac" and have a dialog pop-up asking them where they want to save. So unless the user really wanted to do some custom things they never have to go through the more complicated mixdown setup procedure.

Yes, providing some default profiles would at least be more useful to
the majority of users, but if that's the case (instead of tearing
everything down and just using a save dialog with a filetype combobox),
I guess that means you would have to implement the suggestions I made
initially :)