digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, sa ...

editing, scrubbing is an interaction in which a user drags a

cursor Cursor may refer to: * Cursor (user interface), an indicator used to show the current position for user interaction on a computer monitor or other display device * Cursor (databases), a control structure that enables traversal over the records in ...

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, ''Electronic ...

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 Sound recording and reproduction, recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software pro ...

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 analog ...

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 vinyl m ...

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 A phase vocoder is a type of vocoder-purposed algorithm which can interpolate information present in the frequency and time domains of audio signals by using phase information extracted from a frequency transform. The computer algorithm allows freq ...

, and Time Domain Harmonic Scaling

References

Music software Digital audio {{music-software-stub

Implementations

See also

References