In
digital audio editing, scrubbing is an interaction in which a user drags a
cursor or playhead across a segment of a
waveform
In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electron ...
to hear it. Scrubbing is a convenient way to quickly navigate an
audio file
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, o ...
, and is a common feature of modern
digital audio workstation
A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integra ...
s and other
audio editing software. The term comes from the early days of the recording industry and refers to the process of physically moving tape reels to locate a specific point in the audio track; this gave the
engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...
the impression that the tape was being scrubbed, or cleaned.
Implementations
Common scrubbing feedback techniques include:
;
Resampling : allows playback at arbitrary rates, which also pitch-shifts the audio, approximating the effect of playing audio from an
analog
Analog or analogue may refer to:
Computing and electronics
* Analog signal, in which information is encoded in a continuous variable
** Analog device, an apparatus that operates on analog signals
*** Analog electronics, circuits which use analo ...
source like
tape or
vinyl
Vinyl may refer to:
Chemistry
* Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a particular vinyl polymer
* Vinyl cation, a type of carbocation
* Vinyl group, a broad class of organic molecules in chemistry
* Vinyl polymer, a group of polymers derived from viny ...
with a similarly varying motion
; Cut-and-paste : the original signal is segmented into frames of constant width and playback is obtained by either discarding (time compression) or repeating (time expansion) some frames.
; Timeline stretching : processes the audio to allow playback at arbitrary rates without changing the pitch (
audio time stretching), common approaches include:
the
Phase Vocoder, and
Time Domain Harmonic Scaling
See also
*
Rocking and rolling
Rocking and rolling (also rock and roll) is a name for cueing techniques used in sound recording and video recording, particularly in analog recordings.
In sound recording, the reels of an open reel tape machine were "rocked and rolled" by turn ...
References
Music software
Digital audio
{{music-software-stub