Clicking in expression map sound slot menu latches the clicked expression

Cubase
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1

I’ve noticed that with the new Cubase 15 expression maps, clicking a sound slot in the sound slot list in the left menu seems to latch the articulation you clicked until you re-open the project.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. In a project, go to an instrument track (with an expression map loaded) that has notes written and the articulations written.
  2. In the left zone inspector menu under expression map, in the sound slots list, click one of the unused articulations while playing (or spam click if it doesn’t play that articulation)
  3. This results in that articulation getting latched, and it will play in place of all direction type articulations instead of the correct articulation (Iconica is not affected since it seems to ignore the latched activation note)

It also latches when you go to the expression map setup window and click on any articulation in the sound slot list there.

What is happening is that it’s triggering the articulation you clicked on continuously non-stop until you close and re-open the project. If you start playing, it will trigger the correct articulations that you’ve written while simultaneously triggering the latched articulation (so two articulations being triggered at the same time now). To test you can put a synth in place of the orchestral library so you can hear the expression map articulation activation play as notes. When you click an articulation in the sound slot while playing, the note for that articulation starts playing. If you stop and play again it goes back to normal and plays the indicated articulation, but at the same time the articulation you just clicked in the menu continues playing alongside the correct indicated articulation (so now there’s two articulation triggers going on at the same time which confuses a lot of orchestral plugins). You can get this up to three articulations triggering at the same time (two latched, one normal) if you go and click around the sound slots in the expression map setup window.

It sometimes randomly unlatches if the latched articulation is used somewhere in your project and you play over it.

When latched, you can try clicking the other sound slots, but they will either do nothing, get latched themselves, or randomly everything gets unlatched in some rare cases.

Video demonstration: https://youtu.be/mGmPT7jscVA

System: Windows 11 64bit, Cubase 15.0.30

Third party plugin involved: Spitfire BBC Symphony Orchestra

2

Yeah, I had major issues with Expression Maps when I upgraded to C15 recently. Basically nothing played back properly. And sending KS from my control surface was causing Cubase to latch on to an articulation because apparently now Cubase needs a Note-Off message as well :face_with_raised_eyebrow: . My only workaround for all the new Note-On, Note-Off, latching hoo-ha, was to use program change messages instead of key switches. And try to avoid clicking the sound slots in the Left Zone if you can. Honestly baffled at this latching behaviour. I can’t recall anyone in the last ten years asking for it. IMO it’s a bug being disguised as a feature.

3

I can reproduce it at least with one VST I have.

But Reset MIDI (MIDI->Reset)should fix the problem, I didn’t have to reload anything.

I can also reproduce it with Halion Iconica Sketch but only when using the ‘default’ articulation. The inspector shows the default playing even though the clicked articulation sounds.

4

It also seems to latch by itself randomly sometimes on rare occasions after inputting notes or editing the articulations.

Oh thanks! That’s really helpful.

5

You can also try the Preference MIDI->Reset On Stop.

6

The undocumented changes to Expression Maps in Cubase 15 have been the cause of immense frustration for me. I’ve written about this, and some other weird side-effects in this post. I’m still waiting for Steinberg to even acknowledge that these undocumented changes are intended functionality or not!

7

Cubase not providing things like changelogs or documentation changes seem to be the norm as of late. After some complaining, they now include some changelogs in updates, but only for software products when every single thing that receives updates should have a changelog to prevent things like the “Install Missing VST Sounds” issue from happening again and people having to manually remove stuff they don’t have licenses for because they don’t know what that update is installing.

8

Yeah it is really frustrating. And to me this latching behavior feels too unpredictable to be something intentional, since it also latches randomly on it’s own every once in a while. Before, triggering articulation changes inside some plugins themselves or with a midi keyboard also caused it to latched if I remember correctly, but that was fixed. This seems like a remnant of that.