Interesting, I’ll take a mental note of this.
Usually when I’m interested in batch processing at least for my current use cases, i’m dealing with more than 20 files.
If my advanced preview idea was implemented, some other useful features:
- Search Filter, to find specific files to compare.
- Side by side waveform preview, overlay waveform preview
- Metaplugin preview (essentially it runs the process as if it was doing a render, but takes care of autodeleting if the user chooses not to use the preview-process as the keeper render
- Plugin/Process Settings adjustments per-file, for example if one file needs slightly different settings than the rest of the files (a fade out for example), the user can change settings just for that file and then its re-preview rendered (maybe colour coded differently to show it was adjusted, and an option to reset to the original bulk-process settings)
- Data information comparison in a right panel: file size, length, RMS/Loudness, etc
- Ability to print to PDF
- Auto-Play files in series (search filter affects which files are played)
- Name preview
Perhaps to address some of your concerns, the user would select in the main wavelab window batch file list, which files they want to do advanced preview with… They could shift+click select a series of files, or ctrl+click randomly separated files - and then engage Advanced Preview.