I am starting audio production after many years in software development. I have produced some audio for video in Final Cut Pro and now I want to go to the next level. After I finish the project, I may want to change some settings, which is cumbersome in FCPX (if I want to increase sound adjustment from 10 dB to 11 dB, I need to select them by hand and adjust, instead of doing "find-and-replace" of 10 dB to 11dB). Also, the size of the Final Cut Pro project is quite large.
I am looking for an audio editor where the project file is plain text, which I understand to be an edit decision list (EDL). My goals are:
- to separate heavy digital assets from the light edit decision list
- to put the edit decision list into a version control system like Git and GitHub
- to automate some parts of editing, e.g. find-and-replace on pauses and dB levels
- to use standard audio production techniques: noise gate, noise removal, frequency spectrum adjustment, limiter, compressor, and depulsive filter (removing the pop's in the plosives B and P)
Ideally, the editor would be open source and work on macOS, but I'm open to anything.
I understand that Audacity does all of these except the plain-text part, which means that any edits are destructive, so "version-control" works by saving the project each time.
Three examples outside of audio production are AviSynth, whose Edit Decision Lists are very a few KB of text; OpenSCAD in 3D modelling, which generates STL files from plain-text files that are two orders of magnitude smaller; Inkscape, which reads and writes plain-text SVG files.
Does such a tool exist?