Cubase 12 midi remote is there a way to have one knob zoom both in and out

Cubase
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Using old MIDI controllers (when available for modest money on the used market) has been my little Cubase passion project for the last 18 months or so.

And I’m not entirely joking when saying the following:

The Cubase MIDI Remote could be possibly even be quantified as a carbon footprint reducing initiative, since it gives opportunity for keeping old midi hardware out of garbage dumps, and reduces the need for excessive cycling into newer hardware.

However, I also think that to fulfill this potential better, it may require a bit of a philosophical re-think by Steinberg’s product managers in how they think of MIDI.

Right now it seems that Steinberg sees MIDI mostly in the way it was originally intended (MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0 and arguably the Mackie protocols, which were never officially standardized), rather than how you could use the raw protocol in more extended ways.

For example:

  • Why not have Program Change messages in MIDI Remote?
    • Program change messages would be ideal for triggering Key Commands, since a MIDI Program Change Message is a one-shot message without any additional value. It’s popular in the world of guitar midi pedal boards, often implemented in guitar midi foot controllers and some stomp boxes.
  • Why not allow MIDI Poly Pressure messages as a parallel implementation of CC messages (in the Generic Remote, you can effectively use poly pressure messages as a second set of 127 midi controllers).
  • Why not allow MIDI Note Velocity to control something in the target? e.g. change the target parameter according to how hard I hit a midi controller key or pad?
  • Why not allow different values of CC messages (and poly pressure) to trigger different commands (as in my prior post in this thread).
    • so we could use endless knobs to move the cursor, change zoom and so much much more (also see other posts in this thread).

The argument against more flexibility is maybe user confusion.

But my counter argument is, that Cubase isn’t primarily geared at the novice user. To me, it’s the premier workhorse DAW in the industry, best capable of doing the most things for advanced users. That’s exactly why I’m still using Cubase, despite having licenses for quite a few other DAWs. Cubase does more things than the competition.

So dumbing things down should arguably not be in the Cubase roadmap. Unless Steinberg decides that it can’t make the DAW business model work for advanced users. In that case I’d have a good long cry - and have to move on.

But in the meantime I keep hoping that Steinberg will keep allowing advanced users to implement novel things that aren’t necessarily part of a “standard spec”.

2 Likes
23

Not ideal but there is a partial solution by doing the following:

  • Assign a function to a knob - such as zoom out
  • Create a second page and assign a function to the same knob - such as zoom in.
  • Then select a button and assign - switch to previous page.

In this way, pressing the button will cause the function of the knob to reverse. This of course will interfere with multipage functionality on more sophisticated controllers.- but it’s easy on the brain.

1 Like
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Nope, don’t have that atm.

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After all, it’s not prohibitively difficult to write a script for this style of commands. I wrote some highly embarassing code to see if I can make it work and it does work. And it’s awesome functionality.

But, I’m still fighting with how to make the custom variables work on some mapping pages and them only, how to attach labels to each knob (they are blank since they are being fed from the custom variables), how to easily create mapping pages.

The surface editor on the other hand… Ahhhh! :heart::face_holding_back_tears: I’m loving this thing more with each passing day. Everything is so easy. It’s only those pesky 1:2 commands that spoil the fun. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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The lack of ability to use secondary functions via a shift button doesn’t help, that is for those who can only build a remote via the GUI, and why wouldn’t you use the GUI otherwise, its so fast to get something up and running but it seems like most things, it falls short in the most fundamental ways. So we can’t add subpages via the GUI, ok, so I’ll edit the code after I’ve made the remove. Nope - you can only do it one way or the other . Jeezz.

If you have a NI controller I can show you easy way to do this if not, I’d map two knobs, live with it and move on cause you’ll spend ages trying to figure this out and in my view, this sort of stuff should be done for us and not released half baked.