Scrub Through Music & Podcasts Tracks from Control Center in iOS

Scrubbing audio is probably the fastest way to skip through and navigate within a playing audio track, and iOS allows you to scrub active tracks directly from the Control Center. There’s not much to it and scrubbing is done through a fairly simple gesture, but because the tap touch target is quite small it can take some practice to get right.

You can scrub through any playing song, music, podcast, or show on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Let’s review this nice feature, available anywhere in iOS via Control Center.

How to Scrub Music and Podcasts on iPhone, iPad

Give this a try yourself by starting to play a song from the Music app or a podcast, then follow along:

1. When music or a podcast is currently playing, flip open Control Center as usual with a swipe-up gesture from the bottom of the screen
2. Locate the small playhead cursor (looks like |, a vertical line) and drag it forward or back to scrub the track in the respective direction

Scrubbing tracks from Control Center works anywhere that you can summon the feature from on an iPhone or iPad, be it the Home Screen, within an app, or the lock screen.

Users can also navigate through audio by holding down the back and skip buttons to fast forward and rewind audio from Control Center too, something you’ve long been able to do in the dedicated Music and Podcasts apps for iOS. Scrubbing works in both of those apps as well, which can be directly launched into from Control Center by tapping on the track name

Note that you can not scrub audio tracks playing from a streaming service like iTunes Radio, the feature is limited to audio stored directly on the iOS device.