Compatibility with 3rd party hardware devices

Cubase
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1

Hi, all,

My problem is a bit specific, but I recently bought a Surface Dial and a Touch Mouse by Microsoft and was sad to find out that neither works in Cubase Artist 10. The Surface Dial is a cool little interface device by Microsoft that allows you to interact with apps by rotating a physical dial and clicking it. You can set up individual commands for individual apps and it works well with everything else I’ve tried. Due to the physical, “analog” nature of the device, I was looking forward to using it in Cubase to move faders or other delicate, fine-tuning, as well as using it to control zoom and scroll on the arrangement window. It comes with a volume, scroll and zoom functions built in which generally work well on a system level, but in Cubase only the scroll function works, and not very well. It scrolls way too fast and if you use it on a fader, it also goes up and down way too hard. It’s impossible to use it to fine tune anything. The default zoom function doesn’t work either; it just scrolls in the opposite direction. None of the custom commands I set up worked, either. It’s strange because the way it works is you set it up in the Windows 10 settings to fire a keyboard press. I’ve then configured the exact keypresses I wanted within the Cubase Key Commands panel, but it just doesn’t register.

Likewise, the Touch Mouse has a touch surface which you use to scroll in every direction, but none of it works in Cubase. Clicks and right-clicks work fine, but no scrolling of any kind.

Seeing as how these two devices are brand-new and work on every other app I’ve tried, it seems like Cubase is deliberately refusing to acknowledge specific inputs coming in from these devices, or any “unusual” device. Is there a way to make Cubase recognize these? I’m sure Cubase has great compatibility with physical music controllers, so maybe it’s something it’s just not listening for.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I spent quite a bit of money on these hoping to improve my workflow within Cubase, but now I have to keep a separate mouse on hand which I use only when making music, and then I lose the system-level benefits of the new one haha

Thanks a bunch!

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Interesting. I just bought a surface dial for the same purpose. Really just to have something more ergonomic than a Mouse scroll wheel. I couldn’t get it to do anything with faders, but it’s scrolled through plug-ins, adjusted some parameters but sometimes it in reverse, so that a turn clockwise made the numbers go lower. I was thinking I could use autohotkey to create a scroll wheel macro and assign it to keyboard shortcut and then assign that to the Dial. I am not experienced in creating macros so I don’t know if this will work.

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Update:
Downloaded autohotkey from the Windows App Store.
After a little study I was able to write a little script for a scroll wheel shortcut and link it to the surface dial.
And it worked!
I now have my own Ai knob.

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