Completed Proposal: Improvements to Scrubbing - Phase-2

Proposal pages help us get from feature requests into actual plans. This page is a proposal to improve Scrubbing in Audacity.

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The Problem

Scrubbing was introduced in Audacity 2.1.0 but QA and members of the TLC recognize that, while the underlying technological implementation is excellent,the user interface could do with some improvement. There are insufficient visual cues to indicate to the user that they are in scrubbing mode (which has led to some users being trapped in Scrubbing mode, not understanding what is going on and worse, having no idea how to escape).

Plus there is no GUI method (button or menu command) to enter scrubbing mode, only a mouse and keyboard gesture which makes it hard to be "discoverable".

Proposed Feature

I am proposing a two phase approach. Phase-1 is really a bit of a tidy-up with some of James' suggestions - but not changing the UI, so in this phase all Paul's current UI gestures will be preserved. This should thus make Phase-1 relatively non-contentious.

The second phase will address the UI and how the user accesses scrubbing, that will be harder.

Phase-1

1.1) Change the green triangle on the cursor, so indicating that it is not recording, nor playing, but some other mode.

• James +1, Peter +1, Gale +1 (and if possible, show it before the user moves the mouse. Perhaps even a blinking cursor, the same shape as now).

1.2) Change the green triangle on the play button to indicate scrubbing-play (in both cases possibly a double headed triangle would work, indicating bi-directional). Combined these give a clue that clicking on transport buttons could help.

• James +1, Peter +1.
• Gale 0 (I'm tired of ever changing icons on Transport buttons).

1.3) Make ESC take us out of scrubbing.

• James +1, Peter +1.
• Gale: Does that do the same as Stop? What would be useful would be if ESC restarted forwards playback from the point reached when ESC was pressed, even if that does not happen until Phase-2.

1.4) Make clicking outside the track take us out of scrubbing.

• James +1, Peter +1
• Gale: Is moving the mouse outside the track allowed? One way of keeping forwards scrub going without keeping the mouse moving is to move the mouse to right out of the track.

Phase-1 will not help the user who accidentally strays into scrubbing, but it will give them (and us) a bit of a clue as to what is going on.

P3 Bugs (as part of Phase-1 clean-up)

1.5) http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1053 Status Bar messages incorrect after scrub commences.

1.6) http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=991 Pause button and Pause command are not grayed out as inoperable when in scrub mode

1.7) http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1079 Scrubbing is stopped when a tool that is not Select is chosen

Phase-2

UI/GUI discussion - to be undertaken once Phase-1 is complete.

This will involve a lot more discussion I'm thinking.

2.1) How should the user enter scrubbing mode. Via a GUI?

2.2) Should some tangible widget be dragged to initiate scrubbing, to aid discoverability? Or physically drag something for just for the drag-scrub method? Where would the widget go? On the playhead, in the Timeline, or below it? We don't have many options for modified Timeline clicks - we already use CTRL and SHIFT with drag in the Timeline for Cut Preview and Loop Play respectively.

2.3) Should scrubbing work in all the tools? (see also bug 1079)

2.4) Where should the cursor rest after scrubbing is stopped?

2.5) Reduced physical effort to use scrubbing

• Gale: No-one else seems to care about this, but I want to go back to a previous place and hear from there with less physical effort than now. I want an option to never stop when the playhead reaches the pointer, or to be able to click to resume play when that happens. An option for forwards play only is one possible solution. There is a discussion of this at http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?p=286530#p286530.

Developer/QA Backing

• Peter: +1 for all the Phase-1 steps

• Steve by email 02Oct15: The "Phase 1" plan sounds good

• Gale: Phase 1 is only really sticking plaster. We should move from Phase 1 to Phase 2 quickly. My feeling is that relatively few users are using scrubbing, and perhaps not all are finding it as useful as it could be. In contrast to the many user comments welcoming real-time preview, there seem to have been few comments about scrubbing, except for those falling into it by accident. Considering how popular scrubbing was as a feature request, this seems odd to me.

Use Cases

As we already know from a posting on the Forum we have already had one poor benighted user who stumbled into scrubbing mode by mistake and then couldn't find his /her way out. See: this Forum thread

Details

Explicit in steps 1.1 through 1.7

GUI Examples

Not required.

Previous Feature Requests relating to this proposal

Not applicable.