allow spacebar for play button | Voters

allow spacebar for play button

shipped

Jonathan Perkins

Since many like myself are used to the spacebar being what we hit to "play" a track, like in mnay apple apps or in Premiere, allow us to switch from TAB to the spacebar, or even better, both!

February 11, 2020

Paul Booth

I can see why people wanted this, but I'm amazed there is not choice to switch between tab and spacebar for Play/Pause.
Spacebar is bad choice for play/pause when you are writing - for instance a narrator's monologue for a show. Descript jumps around trying to play/pause when what I need to do is type. 
I agree, keep the Spacebar, but more UX research should have been done to make spacebar optional. Make it the default by all means, but when the spacebar is used in writing so much, having spacebar as the only play/pause option is a bad design choice that leads to a very dissapointing user experience. 
If you want more podcasters and media producers to use Descript, fixing the writing and editing experience is key.

Danny de Hek

Help how do I make the spacebar work?

Kevin McCarthy

Thank you! I discovered that this feature was added when I accidentally hit the space bar, AND IT WORKED! 🙏🏻😍

Rick Maranta

Excellent!

Dan Reyes-Cairo

marked this post as

shipped

Just added in today's v8 release... enjoy!

Benedict Mortimer

Dan Reyes-Cairo: Spacebar stopped working to play / pause as of Version 27.1.2-release.20211120.6 (20211120.6) which is a bit tedious ... can we have it back?

Dan Reyes-Cairo

Benedict Mortimer: Spacebar should still work as of the latest version for all instances except when typing Overdub / Placeholder text (since it's required for text manipulation), in which case Tab is still available for playback while editing Overdub text.

If you're having issues using spacebar when the playhead / cursor is over any video / audio content in the timeline feel free to create a support ticket at https://help.descript.com/hc/en-us/requests/new and we can take a look.

Benedict Mortimer

Dan Reyes-Cairo: Hey Dan thanks for your quick reply - spacebar is working again. I think it may have been glitching on my new MacBook. Could it be an M1 thing? I also had a while where I couldn't correct multiple words at the same time in the transcript.

Nathan Freeburg

Why isn't this the default?

Rick Maranta

Yes, yes, yes. This gets me all the time. I use Articulate Storyline 360 for E-Learning development and other programs that start and stop the timeline with the spacebar.

Andrew Mason

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in development

We are actually working on this. Join the beta program in Discord if you want to test it out. https://discord.gg/AYe6sBd

Laura Kwerel

Andrew Mason: thank you Andrew! I clicked the link and it's not clear to me how to test it out...can you share some instructions on where to look in discord?

Kevin McCarthy

Andrew Mason: 🙏🏻

Kevin McCarthy

I wholeheartedly agree. The developers are quite reticent to implement this, even as a user-configurable option. 
There are three feature requests in total on this subject. I would encourage y'all to up-vote them all. 
https://feedback.descript.com/feature-requests/p/allow-spacebar-for-play-button
https://feedback.descript.com/feature-requests/p/option-to-use-protools-key-controls
https://feedback.descript.com/feature-requests/p/make-the-space-bar-start-and-stop-not-the-tab-button
A workaround I have found is to use a USB transport control (jog/shuttle controller, I use the ShuttleXpress) and map the function buttons on an app-by-app basis so that you achieve consistent behavior across editing tools.