Allow rewind/fast-forward to move cursor by fixed amount

cdr80 · October 31, 2015, 11:47pm

I’ve been trying to work with just the transport window while recording, or more specifically, what you can do while playing your instrument - together with using a remote hardware controller to record your performance that gives you the basic “tape machine” controls (stop, pause, fast-forward, rewind, record).

The key point in this as that if you are a musician playing your instrument AND recording simultaneously with a DAW, then it’s nice to be able to punch in/out and record takes in time (moving back and forth to beat/measure boundaries) WITHOUT USING A MOUSE OR A COMPUTER KEYBOARD. This is easy to do with other DAWs and 3rd party controllers. This led me to try and get the rewind and fast-forward controls on the transport in Cubase to control the project cursor motion so that it can at least stop/start on beat/bar boundaries. Or I’d like to be able to record a part, rewind to the start of a measure or integer division of the beat of my choosing, punch in. and re-record - with just the stop, pause, record, play, fast-forward, rewind buttons AND w/o using locators, cycle record, etc. Having a truly “analog” style fast-forward and rewind buttons in the transport that move the project cursor by an indefinite amount is not helpful in this case.

But from what I can see in Cubase - this kind of navigation of the project cursor along bar/beat boundaries is impossible to do without using the mouse and/or computer keyboard.

You can use the mouse to position the cursor and click in the timeline (also set the quantization accordingly).

You can add the jog/scrub wheel to the transport and click on the plus and minus symbols in the center of it - which nudges the project cursor by the nudge amount.

And there are programmable computer keyboard sequences that allow the project cursor to step back or forward by the nudge amount.

But again, for a musician playing and recording their instrument simultaneously with a remote device allowing minimal “tape machine” style transport functions - all these other ways of controlling the movement of the project cursor via the mouse and keyboard are often more work.

My request is to add an option to assign quantized movement (in bars/beats) to the motion of the project cursor using the fast-forward and rewind buttons in the transport; this option could allow you to set a dedicated quantize value for rewind/fast-forward (to bars or a division of the beat). With this option enabled, I propose that a sustained click on rewind/fast-forward buttons would still move the project cursor (back/forward) continuously - but it would stop on a bar/beat (per the quantize value). A single click on rewind/fast-forward would move the project cursor a bar or beat at a time (per the quantize value). If the project cursor is somehow set to rest on a non beat or bar value in the time line, a single click on rewind or fast-forward would move it to the next bar/beat division (per the quantize value). I would typically use this setting to move the project cursor 1 bar at a time per click on rewind/fast-forward.