Hello.
I’m rather frustrated, so I apologize in advance if this comes off as a rant.
I just upgraded from 10.5 to 11 because I was thrilled to see the new feature promising scaling for windows 10 global DPI settings in Cubase, specifically it said that even plugins that wouldn’t scale normally could now be scaled.
I’m legally blind. I’ve yet to find a DAW that actually works really nicely for me and my horrible, horrible vision, but Cubase was the best I could find and I’ve mostly made it work. Plugins, though, are the bane of my existence. Kontakt especially is just awful for me with its tiny menus. So I was super excited to see this, and it was on sale, so yeah I upgraded!
Except it turns out that if you scale the instrument editor window up with the DPI settings I use, the plugin window extends off the screen, so you can’t see nor use all of it.
I just spoke with a customer support agent who confirmed there is no way to manually resize the window, there is no way to full screen the window, either, so this DPI scaling setting actually made the program less usable for me.
The worst part? This setting didn’t actually do anything. This is actually behavior I already had to deal with in 10 and 10.5. The plugins already went off the screen, because they already scaled with DPI settings. The new setting to increase zoom by a certain percentage is cool, but it doesn’t help if it makes things fly off the screen.
With my vision, I can’t use my system without physical pain below 175% magnification, it just doesn’t work. Cubase /mostly/ works well with that, except the plugins windows which behave as I described. This, for example, makes it so I can’t use the keyboard at the bottom of the Kontakt window, and I can’t access a LOT of things at the bottom of the Massive window, to name a few.
The icing on the cake was the agent kindly informing me that, no I couldn’t get a refund for the product that didn’t do what it was advertised to do, and that there was a trial version I could have used to test it before purchasing. Silly me for trusting Steinberg to do what their advertising said.
…Sorry. That was very rant-y, wasn’t it? I just needed to get that off my chest. It doesn’t help to Karen at people on the internet (and if you’re wondering, no, I didn’t give the agent a hard time. They were just doing their job).
What would hopefully help is telling this story, to demonstrate how badly we need these accessibility settings. Specifically, please PLEASE add a way to make a plugin editor window full screen. It would solve this issue immediately.
I was really excited earlier today when I saw this announcement. I knew Steinberg was good about adding new features and responding to people, so I took a leap of faith hoping I’d finally be able to use a DAW easily despite my disability. I landed on my face. That sucks.
But it happens. More importantly, please, please add this to the list of things to include, it’s really important for visually impaired users like me.
(Edit: I included the screenshots I took to show what I mean. The extra scaling on the project window is actually kinda nice I guess. But you can see the problem with the plugins…)
