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.

Proposal pages are used on an ongoing basis by the Audacity development team and are open to edits from visitors to the wiki. They are a good way to get community feedback on a proposal.

• Note: Proposals for Google Summer of Code projects are significantly different in structure, are submitted via Google's web app and may or may not have a corresponding proposal page.

The Problem

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

Phase-2 will address the UI and how the user accesses scrubbing, that will be harder than the Phase-1 cleanup and should only 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.