oh, really! thats ridiculus! menu lane… it’s gone too far))
I have been meaning to write a comment on here almost exactly like this one, but BA Wheeler has said it all for me. This update is the worst yet. I am extremely disappointed. It is visually inconsistent, things have been moved or hidden which shouldn’t have been – I now have to click a dropdown to see my channel ins/outs!!! – the nice animated menus have been removed, you have to click things multiple times to get them to respond, the colour palette is messed up, it’s buggy and just awful. I love Cubase, have always used it, but this is the worst update I’ve ever purchased.
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I’ve always hate that animation. Much faster to work when they opened immediately
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I thought I would hate it at first, but it never impeded my workflow and I came to really like it. Now you have it on the control room dropdowns but not the channel inspector. It’s so inconsistent. Plus I now seem to have to click the channel name several times in the inspector to get it to respond. Very poor.
I’ma steel this.
Studio One also uses similar typefaces throughout, which is a mistake. Cubendo 12 had degrees of contrast that made ordered sense. That’s dead now. But Studio One, at least, isn’t aggressive. Cubase 13 seems to scream.
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Idem dito… I’m going to upgrade once Cubase gets rid of its skin problem.
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After all the bellyaching in this thread (Including mine!) about accessibility issues I thought I’d try the suggestion that has been bandied around of Studio One, and downloaded the trial.
Very nice UI, if a bit garish on the demo projects, but straight away it was clear that I couldn’t see myself losing 10 years of acquired CB knowledge and the inevitable drop in productivity while re-learning something so fundamental to my work.
So rather than pay three times the price of the C13 upgrade for S1 crossgrade I jumped in with both feet for C13. And you know what … I really do like the new mixing window! Yes, it could be improved, but there is more to like than not, including the flat faders et al.
However, the Project Window white text ABSOLUTELY HAS to be toned down. I’d also prefer losing the Caps on the buttons, but with my failing eyesight, the track names just appear as a complete jumble of letters.
I’ve resorted to tweaking the colour settings to help with clarity (I normally just work with the vanilla settings) but I guess when the inevitable maintenance update comes along I’ll be able to revert back.
Lots of other stuff to enjoy on the new version, so give it a try - you may be surprised.
Okay Steinberg, you’ve snagged me for another year, so do the right thing now and TURN DOWN THE VOLUME ON THOSE LOUD WHITES!
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I had this in it’s own thread, but since this thread seeems to be the repository for the many GUI related complaints I’ll post it here as well.
As someone who has spent literally 100’s of hours creating track presets for all my VI’s across 4 hard drives, I can only describe it as an exasperating design desision to make the search results in the Media Bay SMALLER. Why??? It doesn’t take up any less space, it’ just makes it harder to read. Everything in the left hand pane is the same exact size from Cubase 12, but the results now are noticably smaller that I now have to squint to look through a bunch of self made track presets. I really hope they care enough to fix this. I mean, it absolutely was not broken before…to make this change. Either it’s a bug that got missed or just a horrible, senseless design decision.
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Just checked … yep, definitely tiny text on my Media Bay also.
Must be a bug … as you say, absolutely no design necessity to reduce the size. I’m using a 3440 x 1440 Ultrawide monitor and the text looks lost!
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Yeah, I’m jumping on this train as well. Pretty happy with just about everything, nothing spectacular this time but what’s there I guess is pretty addictive so if it’s removed in half a year thougthexperimentally I’d go “N N N NOOOOOOOOOOH!”
The graphix is the only thing which really didn’t move in the right direction at all for me!
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This thread is now at 331 and each day it keeps growing. But if the Steinberg devs try to make any sense of it, they will get confused because it’s all over the place.
I suggest that we make a coherent list, so they know what most people want, and then submit that list as feedback. It seems like the most logical and organized way.
So I’ll get it started, and feel free to add thing I will surely miss, and once it’s ready in a few days, then we can submit it as feedback, at least those of us who agree with most items on the list.
So without spending two hours reading the whole thread again, but rather from memory after reading most of it since I started it the night C13 launched, this is what I can summarize:
- Many of the GUI fonts are too bold and RGB 255, 255, 255, so too bright as well. But if they make those about 200 RGB for example, then it would look out of place with the rest of the text. So the ideal would be to keep the white font as it is, and use a font weight that is not so bold, but not too light either. If it’s a font that has several weights, not just regular and bold, something in between those two. In this mockup, I used Helvetica Neue which has 14 styles, to show how the track name would look with a lesser weight. The first four tracks have the names duplicated to the right with medium weight, and the last four with regular weight. I prefer the medium weight, and my eyesight is not that great, so I represent the group of people that can’t see really well.
To me and many others, the way it is now it’s too fat, we need to trim that a little bit, but not too much.
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While a plain boring sans serif font like Arial or Helvetica work for many items in the interface, such as the track name (and I think you can do better than that, there are so many great modern fonts out there), having it in the buttons looks cheap. The C12 font for those buttons (M, S, R and W), were like symbols that Cubase users loved and made it look original. So please either bring them back, or design other symbols if you want to change them, but please give us something that looks classy and elegant. These buttons look cheap.
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Bring some sense of depth into buttons and other GUI elements that are meant to reflect mixer buttons. Doesn’t have to be a Photoshop emboss from the 90’s, just something that is not so flat. Think of macOS. Beautiful GUI. Now, Apple started off in 2000 with a very emboss GUI (Aqua), and over the years they brought it down a few notches to make it less 3D, but still very elegant and usable. If you look around macOS, you won’t see any windows with sharp corners, they are all rounded. And while they’re not exactly 3D, they’re not some flat boring style like Windows. I don’t have Windows 11 because my PC is too old for it, but when I use Windows 10 in it, sometimes I get lost because the File Explorer windows don’t have any depth, or drop shadow around them, so in certain areas of the GUI it’s hard to tell at first sight what windows are in the foreground and which in the background. Sadly, Cubase 13 has adopted that flat boring style.
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The whole GUI has a lot of design incoherence. Most of it remains with rounded corners, however the track header buttons are all sharp corners now, which doesn’t make any sense and looks awful.
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Text size is also incoherent, in a GUI where you can’t zoom at will. For example, let’s take a look at this area of the mixer:
You can see that the section names are in a bolder white font that is a bit hard to read, and the Strip components are in a light font that is easier to read, and smaller. However, that’s not the worst part. Let’s see what happens when I make the mixer wider and taller:
As you can see, the font in the Strip components grew in size, but the rest of the text in the mixer section names and even inside Routing, remained the same size, no matter how wide and tall I make it. How does that make any sense?
OK, feel free to reply and add to the list, I spent too much time on this, now I want to make some music!!
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I’m completely confused.
Windows 10 antique desktop …
Fresh Windows 11 install on a modern laptop …
How is this even possible? Uggh …
SO many of the complaints here (ours included) could be dramatically reduced by simply giving us better customization control over things like section font types and font colors. Right now the font color is set up to be automatically white or automatically black past a certain custom color scheme value in preferences.
We have toned down the interface as much as our eyes can stand working in it 7-10 hours a day, but even that is still pretty limiting.
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This is called Visual Hierarchy. Cubase does provide a generally very good Information Hierarchy at its core, and in complex designs like this, optimizing for the needs of most users is a wonderful and difficult challenge. Cubase has done really great work here and that work is still in play.
However, as you correctly point out, Cubase 13 suffers from a mismatch between the Visual and Information hierarchies it provides, which makes navigating the UI much harder and requires users to put in a lot of work to actually find and use the valuable Information Hierarchy beneath it. A Visual Hierarchy is meant to expose and magnify the Information Hierarchy, not further obscure it. As mentioned, it is already very difficult to structure a solid Information Hierarchy in the first place, and Information Hierarchy is the most critical element of navigating complex apps… under no circumstance do you want a Visual Hierarchy that destroys the tremendous time and effort put into your primary usability offering–Information Hierarchy!
Cubase 13 has a bit of an identity crisis in this regard. On the one hand, brand new features like the improved multi-part editor with visibility tab and the new channel tab show a practical understanding of Information Hierarchy needs and their value to the product. These features expose specific data in a context aware and meaningfully placed way, one that understands there is a bigger picture and that some things should be in the background while others should be front and center. In fact, the Visual Hierarchy for these features clearly separates degrees of prominence and places some items in greater importance over others. (For example, both the visibility tab and channel tab are appropriately made secondary to other views.) So, in this case, Cubase 13 got it right.
On the other hand, the Cubase 13 “look” as the OP called it, or the “theme” as many others call it, is a different story. An overly-flattened visual design downplays and even removes Visual Hierarchy entirely. When Visual Hierarchy is undermined, much of the hard work that was done to build an intelligent Information Hierarchy is also undermined. Suddenly your hopes of communicating a logical and organized interface are jeopardized by careless visual design decisions. A casual and irresponsible Visual Hierarchy can instantly take the heart out of a wonderfully designed Information Hierarchy.
Many people, and sadly even younger, less experienced designers, don’t comprehend the criticality of good visual design. Many in this thread have talked about the visual design as only a matter of opinion–“a preferential coat of paint” so to speak. There is room for preference here for sure, in fact, quite a lot of room. But reducing visual design, or shall we call it “look design” or “theme design,” to a matter of preference is highly ignorant and neglects decades of industry research and objectively provable science. You can go in almost infinite directions visually (i.e. lots of room for preference), but good designers will always find and constrain specific areas based on research results (i.e. preference has nothing to do with it).
Cubase is full of excellent designs and poor designs. I don’t have firsthand knowledge of internal Cubase team structures but, the product results point to silo’d ownership and/or designers of varying skill levels leading projects independently. It would be nice if more senior folks were responsible for the primary Cubase UI, as it’s the flagship interface, and less senior folks could get their bearings on integrated plugins, configuration screens, and other less traffic-heavy and highly critical UIs. Alternatively, there might be business struggles or other financial or technical constraints that “forced” Steinberg to provide a release that wasn’t ready (i.e. a visual design update done without the research requested by senior designers). Unfortunately, someone made a bad call internally and some poor design language found its way into the flagship screens. The good news is, the areas where Visual Hierarchy was made worse in Cubase 13 are actually quite easy to correct. Here’s hoping Steinberg improves things in the next few minor updates.
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Does anybody know how Steinberg knows learns and gauges how their customer base feels about updates and things they need to correct? Do they monitor this forum? Or is there some standardized channel where people submit their complaints like the support email that’s on the Steinberg website? I’m wondering if posting here is just talking into the wind or if it’s better to email them.
EDIT: I emailed support at steinbergussupport@yamaha(dot)com
Yes, Cubase 13 has some nice new features and improvements, but the GUI is a total disaster… I can only agree with most of the people here on this topic.
The GUI should look fine enough with it’s default settings. If we are forced to tweak it in order to make it look less painful for the eyes… then there is a design issue.
By the way, not only Pro Tools could be taken as a good example for modern and aesthetic design. UAD - LUNA is even better than PT when it comes to GUI.
The DAW GUI must bring this real studio feeling. Here LUNA wins the race.
Another DAW that has this studio-ish design is Harrison MixBus.
@dylanguitar hi,
Well, depends on the team… The one behind Cubase doesn’t care much about our opinion here. Most of the time our words are just “talking into the wind”. I suppose these guys are living in their own universe?! Many features that are far more important than the GUI, features that haven’t been integrated for decades, aren’t there, yet. Dorico was released 7 years ago, and still there is no even a small degree of integration between both apps?!
The team behind Dorico is a totally different case. They pay a serious attention on their part of the forum and our opinion is important for them. That’s why Dorico is a very balanced product between the user base, publishing requirements and the team’s plans.
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+1 kudos to the Dorico team.
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Yes, the Dorico team deserves our gratitude! 
Gladly as more advanced Dorico becomes, as less dependent on Cubase I am for composing.
The last time I used Cubase for composing music was in February.
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Hmmmm.
Is your Windows 11 PC using a custom scaling value in the Display settings?
And well is your Windows 10 PC doing the same?
Are both PC using the same screen resolution and also Screen size?
Your Windows 11 font example is MUCH larger to me.