Improved seeking

[Paul L]

I made a patch to improve the "seeking" behavior in Audacity. It is here.

http://audacity.238276.n2.nabble.com/Pa ... 64684.html

Problem was that the left, right, period, and comma keys (and SHIFTed keys) worked all right with repeated taps, but if you press and hold, the playhead moves but no sound is played. At least, on my system. Solution was to insert some delays so that play head repositioning is not more frequent than ten times per second. I don't know if that will work on all operating systems.

I did this because I want to take up the challenge of implementing scrubbing, and discovered that the problem of seeking had something in common.

[steve]

It works on Linux, though it's begging for extending the feature to allow scrolling to the left of the initial cursor position.

[Gale Andrews]

It works on Linux, though it's begging for extending the feature to allow scrolling to the left of the initial cursor position.

If I understand what you mean, that was tried before http://audacity.238276.n2.nabble.com/Se ... 60661.html but later made experimental ( EXPERIMENTAL_SEEK_BEHIND_CURSOR ) because it caused some display and playback sync problems.

I'd welcome you (Paul L) re-enabling that feature and seeing if you can fix those issues.


Gale

[Paul L]

I hadn't tried that, but I think I have learned enough to do so.

Meanwhile are you pleased with the improvement I did make?

I am going to rewrite that too to take the guesswork magic number of 100 ms out of it.

I have also got scrubbing of a sort working. It's more of a stutter like the seek, but following the cursor. It is not variable (or negative) speed scrubbing. Though I have tried that too with limited success.

[Paul L]

There's also this oddity. Left/right (once) seems to behave no different from comma/period (both shifted and unshifted), during play: jumping a constant time of 1s or 15s (or other amounts specifiable in Playback Preferences).

But if not during play, left/right jumps a distance that depends on the zoom while comma/period jumps the same fixed times.

Is anybody bothered much by that inconsistency?

[Paul L]

I see AC's changes under EXPERIMENTAL_SEEK_BEHIND_CURSOR would permit left seek beyond the left edge of the selection, but you still can't seek beyond the right edge.

[steve]

but you still can't seek beyond the right edge.

True, but currently, if you click on a track (no selection) then you can seek forward but not backward. If I were wanting to "seek" a particular point in the audio, then intuitively I will click "near" where I think the point is, so I may be a bit before or a bit after the point that I'm looking for, so it would be a better user experience if I'm allowed to do that.

[Gale Andrews]

There's also this oddity. Left/right (once) seems to behave no different from comma/period (both shifted and unshifted), during play: jumping a constant time of 1s or 15s (or other amounts specifiable in Playback Preferences).

But if not during play, left/right jumps a distance that depends on the zoom while comma/period jumps the same fixed times.

Is anybody bothered much by that inconsistency?

As I understand it there are two complaints.

• During playback, there is no way to move the editing cursor and/or expand or contract arbitrary selections using the keyboard.
• When not playing, there is no way to nudge the editing cursor by a fixed amount irrespective of zoom level.

So I would say that LEFT/RIGHT arrow and modifiers do the same when playing as not playing, and a new shortcut is needed to nudge the editing cursor (when playing or not).


Gale

[Paul L]

As I understand it there are two complaints.

• During playback, there is no way to move the editing cursor and/or expand or contract arbitrary selections using the keyboard.
• When not playing, there is no way to nudge the editing cursor by a fixed amount irrespective of zoom level.

So I would say that LEFT/RIGHT arrow and modifiers do the same when playing as not playing, and a new shortcut is needed to nudge the editing cursor (when playing or not).


Gale

These "complaints" are not what I said, maybe someone else has said them.

The second point is incorrect. See the , and . and shift-, and shift-. commands. These jump by 1 s or, with shift, 15 s. Or, other fixed times that you can specify in Playback preferences.

[Gale Andrews]

but you still can't seek beyond the right edge.

True, but currently, if you click on a track (no selection) then you can seek forward but not backward. If I were wanting to "seek" a particular point in the audio, then intuitively I will click "near" where I think the point is, so I may be a bit before or a bit after the point that I'm looking for, so it would be a better user experience if I'm allowed to do that.

You can seek to right of the editing cursor but not past the right edge of a selection.

I guess for some cases you would not want to seek behind or after the selection. I don't think it that important to do so and also provide an option for the behaviour.


Gale