Mystery piece of equipment...

[Chris]

Okay.  I'm wondering whether anyone can help me here - I'm looking for a piece of equipment that an old friend had and I can't remember what it was called or who made it.  It was a gadget that allowed you to scrub through a sound clip with a rotary wheel, but rather than stopping when you stop moving through the track, it carries on playing the sound when you are stationary at part of the track.

I'm probably not explaining it very well, but does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?

[AndyR]

I know exactly what you're talking about. My Boss BR1600 (standalone multitrack machine) has a Scrubbing Tool that operates like that, invaluable for finding edit points etc.

The old DAW I used to use (Cakewalk Homestudio 2004) has scrubbing functionality - it was mouse operated, move the cursor over the sound clip at the speed you want. Never bothered looking into control surfaces (the idea of being able to use a wheel on the control surface instead of the mouse). But I do think the audio stopped if you stopped moving through the clip. I'd imagine this is the software rather than the physical thing (the mouse, wheel, whatever) that you're using to operate it.

I was about to ask "why do you want it to keep playing when you stop moving?", but then I realised I use it all the time. If you're looking for "silence" (eg between the intake of breath and the start of a vocal), having the thing still "playing" when you've settled on what you think is the right place is VERY useful :lol:

[Chris]

I got excited when you said your Boss machine did it, until I saw the price of them  :(

That's exactly what I want it for - finding the exact points in a track that I want.  I remember it also being useful for figuring out what is going on in really fast tracks when transcribing stuff.

Maybe I should be looking at software to do the same thing nowadays rather than hardware - I'll investigate that tonight!

[Toe-Knee]

I believe reaper can do this

[JJretroTONEGOD]

cubase 6 can also do this in real-time like a varispeed tape machine could by assigning a midi controller to that function, I use the Frontier Alpha-track (try googling it) it only works on audio only so if you use vst instuments they must be bounced down to hear the effect...

best of luck
 

[Chris]

I believe reaper can do this

Turns out it can indeed.  Not that smooth but that's probably just my hardware.  Good enough for what I need though. 

Thanks!

[Chris]

cubase 6 can also do this in real-time like a varispeed tape machine could by assigning a midi controller to that function, I use the Frontier Alpha-track (try googling it) it only works on audio only so if you use vst instuments they must be bounced down to hear the effect...

best of luck
 

Thanks for the info.  I'm thinking about trying out a control surface like that Frontier thing too.