Interesting point. Or maybe if they don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel themselves, they could ink a deal with Logi or someone to make a super DAW-optimized mouse and sell it for like $200 or something. I’d pay that if it meant never having a value jump on any click & drag operation ever, personally!
Personally, I also don’t like this. I would also expect, the preference to enable/disable all controllers equally without any exceptions. But the current specification is like this. Therefore we cannot call it a bug and we have to request a new feature.
At what point does a “specification” cross the border into “bug”? This reasoning is diluting the terminology. With that logic you can take anything that is malfunctioning, print it in the manual and call it “by design”.
We’re not requesting a new feature, we’re requesting a fix for the feature that doesn’t work and/or is not done, printed in specs or not.
Hi,
Someone at Steinberg (a Product Owner) creates the specification. He/she says, how should Cubase behave. This behaviour is written in the manual.
If Cubase doesn’t act according the specification, then it’s a bug.
If Cubase behaves according to the specification, but a user doesn’t like it, he/she can make a feature request and ask for a change of the specification.
I used to work in software development as well and that is a tricky topic indeed. Since there is no universal law for what is right or wrong, Martin’s reasoning is correct: If it behaves as defined, it’s considered to be correct.
Therefore, we are not dealing with a bug but with a very odd definition of the functionality. I wonder how the user story for this feature looked like…“As a user I want to be able to screw up all my fader values by just using the mouse wheel”. 
Please excuse the irony…
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Hi,
Of course the use case is simple: I want to edit any parameter value by using mouse scroll wheel.
But then, once you start to use it in the real word, you find out, the Faders don’t work for you in this case. So you have to make an exception. Then you realise, it’s dificult to remember this exception, because you have to remember lots of exceptions accross the whole application and it’s not consistent. So you set a new rule: consistency. Therefore you remove the exception and the Faders are controlled by the scroll wheel again. Then you realise, you would need an exception for the fader, then you realise it’s not consistent… 
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That sums up the dilemma of software development in a very accurate way. 
So maybe it would be good to take a step back and define two usecases. Either I want to edit any parameter value by using the mouse scroll wheel or I don’t want to edit any parameter value by using the mouse wheel and use the mouse wheel exclusively for scrolling in the mixer window and implement that as two options. The current implementation tries to combine both approaches and creates a bit of a mess, so it might be worth rethinking it.
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I also work in software (game) development, and it’s not that I don’t understand the reasoning behind your argument @Martin.Jirsak, it’s just that the logic behind this “feature” narrows it all down to two options:
a) There is some really odd technical limitation that makes it impossible to exclude the scroll wheel from interaction with faders/panning, which I don’t believe, or:
b) the specification was written after the feature was half-done and/or the bug was left in and the specs were changed due to budget restrictions/ending of dev scope.
The third option:
c) …someone thought this was a good idea,
… is simply so insensible I just can’t believe anyone in their right mind would come up with the idea. Even less likely the idea was approved by others. And when this was in testing stage, even less likely that no QA or beta tester would report the flaws in this design choice.
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This user sums things up perfectly. It would be great if anyone from the development or design team could take a look at this and reassess the current behaviour.
@Martin.Jirsak is there any chance that you could forward this post to the right people?
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It’s a sad irony because it’s true.
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Another irony: it’s called SCROLL wheel. In 99% of other software it’s used for scrolling - not changing values. Even if only for the enormous heritage of existing software, forcibly using the mouse wheel for other activities besides scrolling doesn’t make any sense in my opinion. It’s not even good for that because depending on the mouse it can be too imprecise.
Just imagine if “scrolling” in Excel could also change the cell values if you’re not careful.
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Push and hold scrollwheel : you can vertical scroll from every mouse position
You can typically set the scroll speed in your OS and/or your proprietary mouse software if it came with any. In addition to that, you can press and hold the Shift key to get finer control of values with the mouse wheel.
But in some cases it is not. CAD software use the mouse wheel for zooming e.g. In Windows OS you can use the mouse wheel to change the audio level in the Volume Mixer. Using the mouse wheel to change volume is actually quite common in several user interfaces.
I’m of the opinion that you should learn the tool at hand. Using the mouse wheel to change values is an immensely powerful feature once you master it. It greatly increases productivity by speeding up editing in several areas of the program.
Setting the scroll speed is, therefore, dependent on the OS/platform/mouse/mouse software used. It might work worse or better, which is not good.
Zooming and changing volume is not a destructive action in terms of the work you are performing. Also, I’m not offended, but please don’t patronise me assuming that I don’t know how to use the tool. I DO know how to use it and in my opinion it sucks and I constantly get errors in my work because of it since my workflow, in order to be fast, depends on scrolling in the mixer without having to be careful and point the mouse to a tiny strip of screen.
Also, I don’t want the featured removed since you and others seem to like it. I just want an option to turn it off COMPLETELY.
I’m sure it’s not the case, but at this point it seems like stubbornness from the designers.
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Exactly what @OFS says. If @mlib is one of the few users who actually like the current implementation - so be it. Make it an option and everybody‘s happy. But I strongly disagree with the statement „Learn the tool“. That makes sense if the tool makes sense. But it doesn‘t. At least to me and apparently many others.
Absolutely agree.
I found this thread a couple months ago and have been working with Cubase to see if the new Cubase preference has really solved my problem.
Background: I have a bit of a visual impairment. Basically what I mean by that is I can generally read most printed material as long as it’s not printed too small like a telephone book (remember those, lol). I generally don’t have to do anything special in terms of seeing any information on my screen. Where I have a problem is that I often loose where the cursor or mouse pointer is located on the screen. For most applications that I use this is not an issue however things end up getting changed in Cubase that I did not intend to change.
If, for whatever reason, I don’t know where the mouse pointer is located on the screen, I don’t initially see where it’s at, and then try moving the pointer so my eyes can see it, things are getting changed accidentally and I may not necessarily see it right away if something has changed by accident or not.
I first got Cubase in 2011 not long after version 6 came out. At that time I was using an Apple Magic Mouse. One of the features of that mouse was that the surface of that mouse could also be used for various gestures one of which was scrolling or changing values in an application. Unfortunately, this was a real problem with Cubase. I was changing things accidentally that I had no intentions of changing. I ended up spending way too much time finding and fixing these accidental changes. At that time I couldn’t find any real solution to this problem. A couple years later I picked up Pro Tools. This problem has never been an issue with Pro Tools and I’m not able to find anywhere where you can change values of something by using the scroll wheel. A scroll wheel is a scroll wheel in Pro Tools. I upgraded Cubase a couple times over the years and still had the issue with Cubase. Version 13 introduced a preference (Vertical Scrolling: Disable Mouse Wheel for Parameter Change) to limit this however it doesn’t completely resolve my problem.
So here’s my question then:
Is there another preference to prevent this from happening?
This also happens when I’m trying to scroll on the mix console screen and sometimes in the edit window as well. When looking at a large project with 79 tracks for example, it’s hard to scroll from one area of the tracks to another without accidentally changing something. I know there’s a scroll bar at the bottom of the mix console screen and the channel overview at the top of the screen but there must be a better way. What’s the best way to scroll through things in the mix console?
To me, either program will allow me to do what I want/need to do but Cubase does have some features that Pro Tools doesn’t that I’d like to be able to use. I have been trying to transition back to Cubase however I still change things accidentally because of the scroll wheel issue even with the new preference enabled (checked). To me this problem really is a deal breaker. I really don’t have time to track down accidental changes and then fix them and I don’t want to submit a mix to a client without having 100% confidence that I found them all.
Just to let you know I’m running a Mac Studio on Ventura with Cubase 13 Pro. I use an Apple wireless trackpad and also a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball as my pointing devise. For Cubase I mainly use the trackball.
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I feel you.
As you mentioned, C13 brought some improvements, but still there’s so many accidental changes that happen (especially on the mixer window).
Many users wrote in the forum about it, hopefully we’ll see another improvement on this matter. 
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Thanks @dream !!! 
. When I first saw this, I went through and read all the comments on this post. Thanks to @ ggmanestraki for the nice graphic showing where you can and can’t change things accidentally on the mixer screen. I am however a bit concerned that this was an issue when I first got Cubase version 6 back in 2011 and yet finally a new preference was added for version 13 to address this issue. That sure is a long time for any type of solution.
From reading all the comments, I get it that people want to change values with the scroll wheel but I’m not one of those people. There maybe should be a preference that says either A I want to. use the scroll wheel to change values or B I want to use the scroll wheel for scrolling and I don’t want to change values with it. There may be other options that other people feel would be appropriate. To me a scroll wheel is a scroll wheel. I’m not using any AutoCad type of applications or anything else that relies on that option. As I said in my original comment Pro Tools only uses the scroll wheel as a scroll wheel - you can’t change values with it. This problem really is a deal breaker for me. I can’t sit around another several years for a proper solution. I wish the current preference took care of the problem but it doesn’t fix my problem since I can still change panning and fader setting which can also be done with the scroll wheel on the edit screen.
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What Steinberg needs to do is to gather all feature requests, such as this one, pile them all up in order of popularity, the most popular on top, of course, then open up Visual Studio, go to the File menu and select “New Project…”.
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iTom, beautifully said and perfect recap.
I’m on of those users that, like you, wants that option.
Even knowing about the issue and being careful… yet, I make accidental changes.
Funny enough, many similarities: I’m on a Mac Studio, M2 Ultra. I’ve used cubase on a Mac since version 6 (I was on win before that).
I’m a PT HD certified user, know PT very well, and I always bring up those couple things I wished Cubase had, that make my life easier in PT, just few small things.
Cubase has other things light years ahead and it so much more enjoyable to use, so I’m hopeful to see certain things well implemented here as well.
Argh, day dreamer.
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