Bugzilla – Bug 385
Quick play intuitiveness and safety
Last modified: 2018-08-20 11:51:36 UTC
This can be a real annoyance when a user accidentally clicks in the timeline during recording. They may have meant to click in the waveform to set a label.
Peter raised this off list with me. Is there a Forum discussion about it? I find it hard to call it a bug. It's called Quick Play. If you wanted to stop the recording and play from the click point it's a big time saver. If the mouse cursor changes to a hand, you know clicking there will stop the recording. About all I could suggest (if it could be done) was to force the mouse cursor to be further inside the Timeline before changing to a hand. Ideally it wouldn't change as soon as the top of the cursor touches the bottom border of the Timeline which is what it looks like now. Nor would I think using QuickPlay during record justifies a prompt. User would turn the prompt off, so it wouldn't be effective.
(In reply to comment #1) If the convenience of immediately stopping recording to playback a specific section is greater than the frustration of accidentally clicking in the timeline and stopping a live (never to be recovered) recording, then yes this is not a bug. Peter mentioned this on the Timeline page of the manual and I see that you have beefed up the documentation. http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Timeline Corrected the typo in the summary :(
(In reply to comment #2) > If the convenience of immediately stopping recording to playback a specific > section is greater than the frustration of accidentally clicking in the > timeline and stopping a live (never to be recovered) recording, then yes this > is not a bug. Sounds like you still think there is some enhancement action to take, but what would that be that is consistent with the feature and not restrictive / obtrusive? If it can be changed I do think Quick-Play activates too close to the top of the waveform; and I do think the "hand" cursor is not a good descriptor on its own of "immediate play" - I think it should include the speaker icon. I also figure that if and when we have "scrubbing" which is what many users really want we might well do away with Quick-Play as it is now. Quick-Play has a lot of features like scrubbing but I think many don't understand it because they are looking for a permanent "handle" you can drag (or click to move) as in a media player. Have you noticed that if you hover in the Timeline over the edit cursor (so that you get the Quick-Play arrowheads instead of the hand) then drag and release, playback doesn't start? That does look like a bug - why would it be helpful not to start playback?
(In reply to comment #3) > Have you noticed that if you hover in the Timeline over the edit cursor (so > that you get the Quick-Play arrowheads instead of the hand) then drag and > release, playback doesn't start? That does look like a bug - why would it be > helpful not to start playback? It is hovering over the playback-start cursor that changes the pointer to the playback-range pointer. Try this: 1) Select a range of audio 2) Hover in the timeline over the playback-start cursor and drag left 3) Hover over the playback-end cursor and drag right 4) Spacebar to play. I don't know why anyone would want to do that when it is quicker to just click and drag in the timeline, unless for some reason you wanted to precisely select the play region, but there's nothing "quick" about it. To be consistent with other Quick Play behaviours I agree playback should start after step 2. 5) While Quick Play is occurring, drag the playback-end cursor to a new position - playback stops at the old playback-end cursor position. > Sounds like you still think there is some enhancement action to take, but what > would that be that is consistent with the feature and not restrictive / > obtrusive? I think Quick Play during record is dangerous and should be disabled. Having a narrower vertical range in the timeline where the Quick Play pointer is activated might help, perhaps above the tick-marks. Is it time to change the title of this bug to something like "Quick Play Behaviour", or start a wiki page?
Please duke it out on audacity-quality or on a wiki page. If I could move comments 1 (Gale),2 (Bill), 3 (Gale), 4 (Bill) and 5 (James) to wiki, I would.
I've changed title to "Quick play intuitiveness and safety" and made it a summary bug. Essentially I think it's user error if someone stops recording with QuickPlay, though we could do more to prevent it. I had seen no complaints about this before now. It's not a priority for me to start a Wiki page. It would be done quicker if Bill felt it important to start one.
(In reply to comment #0) This is exactly the same bug as #802 which has been worked on and fixed by Steve recently. So I believe that this bug can be closed as a duplicate oh #802.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 802 ***
