Completed Proposal: Improvements to Scrubbing - Phase-2

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Revision as of 15:57, 5 October 2015 by PeterSampson (talk | contribs) (→‎Proposed Feature: typos)
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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) It should be possible to enter scrubbing mode via GUI. (i.e. keyboard shortcut or (ctrl)(shift)mouse-click on track don't count). The current solution is undiscoverable. You wouldn't guess that there was a scrubbing feature from looking at the track.

2.2) IF mouse position is used, THEN there should be some tangible widget to be dragged.

  • Details: 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) Scrubbing should work in all tools. (see also bug 1079). Scrubbing should fully enable those tools.

  • Note: The current implementation of scrubbing is a significant regression on the erstwhile waveform Quick-Play in that scrubbing does not allow the user to independently modify the cursor or selection while scrubbing. Possibly scrubbing can be enhanced enough that Quick-Play as a separate feature is no longer needed.
    • Peter 05Oct15: I would want to hold fire on thinking about losing Quick-Play from the Timeline - it is a very useful feature that I find myself using all the time.

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

  • 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

TBP


GUI Examples

TBP

Previous Feature Requests relating to this proposal

Not applicable.

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