This article describes how to use scrubbing and jogging features of Cakewalk Sonar together with JSonar. It applies to versions of JSonar and Sonar from 4.2 up to 8.0.
– contributed by Victor Tsaran

Introduction

Cakewalk Sonar provides a wonderful facility that allows the user to navigate the project using various measurement units, such as time (hours, minutes and seconds), musical time (measures, beats and ticks) and frames. While a lot of mouse users may not appreciate this feature, it nevertheless is loved by professional engineers and becomes handy when the user needs to work with small chunks of data.

What is scrubbing and jogging useful for?

Some of the cases where scrubbing and jogging become useful are:

  • navigating between small pieces of information in the project where precision is required.
  • editing music or speech material where the user needs to manipulate (delete, insert copy or paste) small chunks of data in the project.

How to enable scrubbing and jogging in Cakewalk Sonar?

By default, scrubbing and jogging facility is turned off (don't know why). Thus a few lines need to be added to your cakewalk.ini file in order to enable this feature. Below are the lines that need to be added:

  1. JogPosTimer=120
  2. PauseOnJog=1

Ideally, you should add these lines using the “options->initialization file” dialog in Cakewalk Sonar as to avoid any typing mistakes. Place the text to the left of the equals sign into “option” edit field and the text to the right of equals sign in the “value” edit field. Hit the “set” button after each setting. Click OK after you are done. If you decide to insert these lines manually, place them inside cakewalk.ini in the “[WinCake]” section. Please remember to restart Sonar application for your changes to take effect.

How to configure scrubbing and jogging with JSonar?

The beauty of JSonar's implementation of this feature is that we allow the user to navigate various units, e.g. frames, samples, ticks and uticks (high-resolution ticks). It is possible to reconfigure the three shortcuts above to jog (or scrub) by any number of these units. Here is how this works:

  1. Press Control+INSERT+M and choose which of the movement units you want to configure (small, medium or large).
  2. In the edit field that appears type the number of the units followed by one of the following letters:
    • “t” for ticks.
    • “s” for seconds.
    • “f” for frames.
    • “a” for samples.
    • “u” for uticks (high-resolution ticks).

    For example, you could say “10a” for 10 samples, 100t for 100 ticks, 50f for 50 frames or 3s for 3 seconds.

  3. Press OK to confirm your changes.
  4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each movement unit (small, medium or large).

JSonar will remember your choices until you change them again, even after you restart the application.

How to actually scrub and jog?

Now we've come to the actual fun. JSonar allows the user to jog through the project using the following shortcut keys:

  • Control+J/K – navigate in small units.
  • Control+Shift+J/K – navigate in medium units.
  • Control+Shift+Windows+J/K – navigate in large units.

Please note: “j” navigates backward while “k” navigates forward.

By default, JSonar will announce the current time in the units that you preconfigured, however, you can disable these announcements through “Verbosity Settings” (INSERT+V) by turning off the “Announce Time While Jogging” option.

While jogging simply allows the user to navigate through the project, scrubbing will actually audition the data under the cursor. Scrubbing is particularly great when the user wants to delete an unwanted sound or a syllable or whatever else. Using scrubbing with JSonar is similar to that of jogging with a minimal difference:

  • Press and hold down the CONTROL key.
  • Hit letter “b” to turn on scrubbing but continue holding the CONTROL key.
  • While holding the CONTROL key, use jogging shortcut keys to scrub in various preconfigured movement units as described above, i.e. Control+J/K, Control+Shift+J/K and Control+Shift+Windows+J/K.
  • Release the CONTROL key at the point where you want audio engine to stop.

At this point you can continue using other Sonar commands, e.g. to perform selection.

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