Completed Proposal: Improvements to Scrubbing - Phase-2

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Revision as of 21:51, 9 October 2015 by Galeandrews (talk | contribs) (Reply to Steve: I was not advocating removal of Timeline Quick-Play but for me it is not as pleasant to use as the old waveform Quick Play nor is it a full substitute for waveform scrubbing)
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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 access scrubbing, and escape from it, via a clear 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 to drag playback, there could be some tangible widget to be dragged. However this goes against 2.5) which seeks to make the drag less physical effort. Therefore an alternative could be to have the playhead widget not as the dragger but only as the up (off) /down (on) control to initiate scrubbing. If there is no drag widget then some option is needed to keep scrubbing alive when the playhead reaches the pointer.

  • 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.
    • Gale 06Oct15: Me too, but that's mainly because I find the current scrubbing hard to use/too much mental and physical effort.

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.
    • Peter 08Oct15: But Gale that is precisely what Quick-Play on the Timeline does for us right now with a simple single click of the left mouse button (I use it all the time to do just that).
    • Gale 08Oct15: In the link to the topic above I say why I believe Timeline Quick-Play is inferior to scrubbing in the waves. In short, Timeline Quick-Play offers no speed change on the fly, no drag-seek (which is less RSI than continual left-click), and makes it easier to see "what you are doing" - you can focus on the waveform while listening, without distractions of Timeline numbers, an extra playback cursor and a vertical white line.
      • Steve 09Oct15: I must disagree with Gale most strongly on this point. Timeline Quick Play was carefully and thoughtfully designed with the needs of users in mind. I am very pleased with the outcome, I use this feature all the time, and have received many thanks and compliments from users about this feature. I will strongly contest any proposal that will mess up Timeline Quick Play. I agree that scrubbing needs radical improvement to make it useful, but please leave Timeline Quick Play out of this. There are plenty of other ways to improve scrubbing without messing with the highly successful Timeline Quick Play.
      • Gale 08Oct15: Timeline Quick-Play's (undoubted) improvements removed a feature I used, to lock the play cursor. I think we have agreement to eventually reinstate that in an expanded feature that has "recording points and regions" and "playback points and regions".

        In any case, nothing I wrote necessarily advocated removal of Quick-Play - indeed I queried James over how his "drag the playhead" proposal would impact Timeline Quick-Play and questioned if doing dragged scrubbing in the Timeline is the best place to do it. Unlike Steve I don't see it as impossible that dragged scrubbing could replace Timeline Quuick-Play.

        But from my personal perspective, Timeline Quick-Play remains more awkward than the now removed CTRL + Click in the waveform Quick-Play. Timeline Quick-Play is not a complete substitute for a vari-speed scrubbing feature that has "minimal RSI" ability, but we don't have that yet. Example: Drag in the Timeline and release the mouse. While the audio is still playing, press the mouse button and drag again. Audio stops at the end of the previous play region. Yes I know you can release the mouse again...

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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