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".

Bugzilla entry #1251 has been created to track this.

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

• See the Talk page.

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
• And see this Forum thread for another example of a confused user who wants to scrub, has read the Manual - but is still stuck.

Details

TBP

GUI Examples

TBP

Previous Feature Requests relating to this proposal

Not applicable.