Scrub
From N-Track Wiki
"Scrub" is a feature we used back in the bad old days of reel tape decks. Tape decks had a lever to defeat the mechanism that pulls the tape away from the playback head, with the drive motors disengaged. We could move the reels by hand and listen to the resulting sound, which would be odd. But it was very helpful for the following kinds of things:
- Finding the point where a note begins, for a splice or edit of some kind
- Trying to tell if it's the guitar or the keyboard that's coming in early or late in some spot
Some other DAWs have this feature. I don't know exactly how it works (Mark or someone, please chip in!) But I think the general idea is to put the system in "scrub mode", which changes the pointer (so we know). Then, when we drag the pointer across the timeline, the track or tracks play where we drag, at the speed we're dragging.
I realize that this is not a trivial feature.
For my specific purposes, something simpler would probably work just great: the ability to play back at much slower speeds (half, quarter). Also, it would be important to support MIDI also. I need to be able to scrub (or playback at slow speed) the whole mix, not just one track.
On tape, when scrubbing, the pitch would change with the playback speed, of course. In software, it would be great if it could pitch-shift on the fly to avoid this. That would be nice, though probably not necessary. (What do other DAWs do?)
I have a hardware solution, a Tascam MX2424. There are two scrub control surfaces arranged as two concentric circles. The inner circle moves you as if you were moving the tape by spinning them manually. The tinmeline moves in accordance with the movement on this inner circl(either clockwise or conter-clockwise), both forwards and backwards. The outer circle controls timeline like a fastforward/reverse. Both move the timeline without changing the pitch.
This works out quite well for editing and determining points for punch in/out duties. It feels quite intuative and I really miss this feature when I import the files into nTrack for the editing stage. I export the files back into the MX2424 and use an analog mixing desk to sum the channels and record the "master mix" onto my PC using a RME soundcard. The connection between the MX2424 is ethernet at 100Mbps so the file transfers are almost instantanious. I control the MX2424 through an application on my DAW so everything can be controlled from it, except scubbing in nTrack.
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