i just exported from Davinci Resolve 21 to Audacity 4, and something i immediatly miss is hearing the audio play as i drag the playhead around with my mouse. it makes the whole process slower.
In Audacity 3 that was called scrubbing, and I have no idea if that is planned for Audacity 4.
If you like that feature, I’d recommend trying Audacity 3.7.9, available here.
While Audacity 3 has scrubbing and seeking, it also is rather broken (eg seeking doesn’t actually show playback position) so I wouldn’t advise using it if you need scrubbing.
I have however added scrubbing to Soundscaper, my web port of Audacity 4.
I can see where this would be useful at certain, sufficiently-high zoom levels, when you’re close enough to the waveform to effectively drag across it in something approximating real time.
Doing it when you’re zoomed way out to where several minutes of the track are visible, not so much.
Nah, scrubbing is very useful especially zoomed out. Even though you only hear small audio snippets of a few ms, it tends to give you enough information to figure out where in the audio you are - eg whether music is playing, which speaker is speaking, things like that
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I’ll buy that, if it’s implemented right.
I bet it’s hard to implement right.
(By which I mean, finding the right formula for how long a snippet of sound you play, vs. how frequently you move within the audio buffer, relative to the position of the playhead and the speed at which the user’s dragging it… Plus, how far ahead of the playhead you pull audio from when it’s moving, since you’d want to slightly anticipate the movement (the more zoomed out, the farther ahead you’d go) so that the user can position by ear without overshooting the location they’re trying to find.)