kɜ:ʳ 
experiments with Audacity as an image editor. conclusions:
- many filters corrupt the image header, which then must be manually restored
- filters can only operate over rows of pixels at a time unless very small selections are used
- most intertemporal filters (echo, reverb, wahwah) smear the color channels together and result in grayscaling
analysis: interesting results are possible, but could be done more easily in a purposebuilt tool https://cybre.space/media/CYJiPsQjfJ3PEqnT51M
@chr is it Linux' Audacity that one uses normally for transforming soundfiles?
@chr thank you. So one can use it to process images. How about other files? Do you have a link to a tutorial? It coul be interesting for making art.
@irgendlink i don't i'm afraid, was just experimenting based on some posts i saw here the other day. however people have been doing this for a while, if you search up 'audacity image processing' you'll probably find some good blog posts or whatever.
i don't know how useful it'd be for other kinds of files... images and audio are the two big ones where the raw binary data is reasonably useful to manipulate
@chr i used to do experiments with steganography wich hides text in image files. It's a nice playground. I'll try out Audacity. Maybe there's happening some nice photo variations.
Thank you for the hints.
@irgendlink it's a general purpose (crossplatform) audio editor, yeah