I am using Cubase 8.0 on OSX 10.11. I have a persistent problem with automation points being created when I am clicking to group select far from any line. I can see what is happening. When I click, a new point is created. If I continue to drag to select, the new point jumps to the cursor position and I am dragging it instead of selecting. I think maybe I am clicking on a point that would be on the line if it were longer but the new point appears on the existing line. I have searched and searched and have not found any one else with this problem. I think the problem is worse if the zoom factor is small so the line are close together. Maybe this doesn’t happen to others because of peculiarities in the way that I draw my automation or because I often have things zoomed way out but this is definitely happening to me and it is definitely a bug.
Hi,
There is a new behavior (but I would say it’s since Cubase 8.5, no since Cubase 8.0). You don’t need to switch to the Draw tool to be able to create a new automation point. So once you click to the Automation track (Group track is an Automation track, in fact), to the automation curve (or very close) the node is created.
It seems, you click to the automation curve (mainly if you are zoomed out). And then, once the node is created, you will immediately move it, of course. It seems, you are using Snap to Cursor, so it’s snapped.
To select the automation nodes, click out of the automation curve, please.
Well, I guess I was not clear enough. I have a number of times now just started clicking above all the automation just to see if I could make the bug happen and it does. A new, selected point appears down on the line not even at a point closest to the cursor but somewhere down in the middle of the line. I mentioned that the point jumped to the cursor because, at first, I thought it was just what you said, but that is not it. I suspect a lot of people have had this happen a few times and thought they had accidentally grabbed and moved a point. If you undo to restore things, it deletes the new point and you never know what happened. I believe if you have some automation curves that have some verticality and zoom way out so that the lines are close together and vertical and you click above them you can make it happen, too.
Yes, because you are very close to the Automation curve then… I see… Do you mean the Horizontal or the Vertical Zoom Out? I mean the Vertical one, so the tracks width is very small. Do you mean the same, please?
Ok, I decided that, since I issued a challenge I should take it myself and I found that things weren’t behaving as I had thought. I don’t remember which parts I was working on before where I was able to click far above the existing points and get points inserted but on the part I was currently working on I found bad points. There are points that I can’t select by clicking on but can select by clicking on a very small, maybe exact area nearby. I checked out two of the points closely and found that I had to click a bit above one of them to select it. If I clicked a little below there, a point was inserted below the existing point. I had to click to the left of the other one to select it. If I clicked a little more to the left I got a point inserted pretty far down the line. I then remembered that I had experienced points I couldn’t select before and just area selected them. At some time I might go back and check out my other automation but I bet it was bad points in them, too, but that in those “ghost” areas that selected a point or inserted one on the line it was connected to were farther from that point. Probably most people experiencing this bug are just finding points they can’t select so they just area select them.
[Update] I found that one of the “bad points” (ones which I could not select by clicking) was 9 points stacked on top of each other. I was selecting a point by clicking but it was not the one on top of the stack. How that happened and how it is connected to selecting the top point in the stack by clicking somewhere other than on the point is a mystery but I kept clicking on the point and scrolling up points from underneath to count them. After deleting all the extra points I was going to do the same with the other bad point and I found that it was now completely normal and I could click select it. You definitely should select the top point in a stack so that’s a bug but I suspect the construction of the stack was via a bug, too.
[Further update] I encountered another point I could not click select. This time it was a stack of 4 points all in exactly the same location and with the same value. I clicked on the point and that selected a point that was covered up by the top point so I could not see that there was a selection except by looking at the location and value fields at the top of the window. When no point is selected, they are blank but they had values even though no visible point was highlighted. I can only assume that a covered up point was highlighted and I just could not see it. I thumbwheeled the point up from behind the top point and did the same for the other two covered points. I decided to undo that and see if I found other stacks of points. After I did that, which should have just moved the points back under the top one which was never moved, there was no stack of points any more so those points did not get there by conventional means. After saving my file, I did redos to see what happened and they just applied to the one remaining point. There should have been three “Set automation value” operations in the history list but there were only two. My surmise is that sometimes the point that gets created when you click somewhere other than on a point or line goes right under an existing point.
I believe I have a handle on this bug now so I will summarize. Sometimes when editing automation in Cubase, clicking as if to start a group selection causes a point to be inserted on a line at a point that might be a good distance from the cursor. That point is selected when created so if you continue the selection operation, you are just dragging the new point. Maybe this has happened to you and you thought that you had accidentally grabbed a point, undid, and continued. That deleted the inserted point and restored things as it would if you had actually grabbed a point. Another way this bug manifests itself is when the new point is directly under an existing point. Then you have point that won’t click select. You are actually selecting the point underneath. You can move it and see a selected point emerge from underneath the point you were clicking on. If you just group selected, then you were selecting both points and then moving them together. I posted this on issues but I doubt it will be accepted because I can’t give specific instructions for recreating this bug. However, I can provide a sample file and general instructions on how to make the bug appear.
http://www.joliraja.com/cgi/TestAutoBug.cpr.zip (It’s a Mac file)
This is a cpr file with one instrument track but no instrument or part. It just has automation and that does not start until about measure 32. I don’t know if the horizontal zoom will be preserved, but I had this zoomed so that about one measure appears. The automation makes a sort of sawtooth pattern. I can get the bug to happen by clicking above lots of the top right points on the teeth but never with the top left. There is one point that is particularly easy to get the bug to happen with. It is at 32.1.4.80, If you click at about the intersection of the line extended up from the right side of this point and the line along the bottom of the point above and to the right [was erroneously left], you should see a new point appear on the line extending down from the point. By clicking lower but between the lines extended from the sides of the point, you should get points to appear in different places. By click close to the point but above and on the left side, i have gotten a new point above that point. Since I could find nothing about this bug and feel sure it is happening to lots of people, I thought I would post these findings.