Cubase 8...Hard on the eyes?

The only thing Cubase has going for it, design-wise, is its dark theme.

The rest is a hot mess of terrible font choices, pixel hairlines, inconsistent scrollbars, inexplicable gradients and gloss, fugly skeumorphism and corner radii that looks like it was mashed together from several different apps.

If it were as bright as Cubase SX, Studio One or Sonar X3 (the Console), I’d probably be in Sonar right now. Both Studio One and Sonar are better designed, they’re just a bit too bright for late night work.

Since about 50% of my DAW screen, at any given point in time, is showing various plugins, most of them ugly, too, the lesser of the evils is Cubase – ugly, but dark.

That, btw, is a terrible slogan. :laughing:

“Cubase. Ugly, but at least it’s dark.”

Some of the ugliest plugins ever designed are also my favorite:

Lexicon PCM Native
Waves Gold Bundle (but has an excuse, as most of it was designed in the 90’s)
Meldaproduction Plugins
Blue Cat Audio
Nomad Factory Plugins
Voxengo

There are some very nice skins for the Arranger and Console, but the stuff that’s not skinnable (everything else) is worse than the worst designed thing in Cubase. And not just ugly, design-wise, but a mess of parameters and overly complex UI elements / features.

You can colour the entire track description rather than just the left tab.

Basically, Mixconsole would be a LOT easier if it just had vertical rules like so (although done with a LOT more style, of course.


All I want is to be able to see each track from top to bottom without getting confused as to which control goes with which channel.

Quite a few have been asking for full color track lanes on the MC for a long time now, I was sure that they would have implemented this simple feature on v8!

+1 Big Time!

Perhaps when Steiny finally gives us ‘movable rails’ in the mixer.
C9?

{‘-’}




Well it is possible to get it really white ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Arrrrggghhh my eeeyyyeesss. :laughing:

:sunglasses: :mrgreen: I guess I’m way to much into a white Christmas

I’m relatively certain that it’s not my monitors or their resolution. They way I’m set up works very well based on how my work area is situated, for just about every piece of software I use, including for other DAW’s. As I said, I use several DAW’s. It’s not that it doesn’t work for Cubase, I just find Cubase to be the least visually friendly. I started using Cubase on version 6 I believe, using a single 22" monitor. Since then I’ve gone from the single 22, to two 24’s, to three 27’s, and now the two 42’s. I’ve had a similar experience with the Cubase visuals the entire way. Obviously there’s always going to be a range of opinions on this as our eyes are all different. I just thought maybe someone would be willing to share some display templates…Maybe there’s some display tweaks that I haven’t done or thought of.

You sure can. However, in classic SB colour-scheming…

The colour overlays THE BUTTONS! So… if the track is green, one gets a green-tinted mute button. Purple? Purple-y mute button.

Just keeping the buttons -consistent-? Why that would’ve been too easy. :smiley:

What makes my eyes spin with Cubase is the lack of consistency. My eyes are always looking for familiar landmarks… but since everything looks a -little- different, they (my eyes) can never come to rest.

…so I don’t use that colour overlay thingee. :smiley:


This is the first time I’m actually comfortable with Cubase and it’s look. I think this the best Cubase yet. Sorry to hear it’s not working for some of you guys.


.-.

Change lcd setting (on the panel itself). It helped me.

More than happy with the overall look and feel C8. Main gripes would be the horrible spreadsheet look of the sends/inserts racks and the horrible colour mixer, being able to add custom colours to swatches would be preferable but although lacking a whole skin change it’s really quite easy to to customise to taste.

One other thing is that in the real world, courted buttons normally have black test, not white as in SB’s mix console. A simple choice would allow more laid back pastel colours for most of the buttons in the MC which would be far easier on the eyes.

Other GUI elements that could be improved are ugly racks and huge fonts, far to wide, and the slot are to high with huge fonts, quite a waste of space IMO, they could be far more sleek and, the new chord pads, if they wear in the real world, you’d be using three finger to play a single note! Better if they were narrower, the options and set up could all displayed simultaneously then. Between the chord pads and rack, it’s easy to loose a whole load of visual real estate for not much purpose.

Cubase is looking more and more “childish” IMO. Started with C7 (especially the mixer).

From SX1 all the way to C6/6.5 it looked more and more professional.

I actually love the new huge fonts. Especially the huge track name fonts. They look higher resolution than before. If they change the fonts back to the old ones because of you, so help me, I will hunt you down and I will… :laughing:


.-.

I thought SX1 to C6 was absolutely horrendous. So bad I refused to use it. Very ugly and busy IMO.

+1

I find Cubase 8 much more readable from a distance than previous version.

Yes, the new fonts are a big improvement. There are a -lot- of improvements. That said:

It would be instructive to see a time-lapse of all the changes in just the fonts and colours since 7.0.0. :smiley:

The whole GUI gets tweaked a little here… a little there… with each update. Apparently based on some amount of customer screaming.

I didn’t say that SX1 looked good, mind you :laughing:

I said that it progressed more and more in a pro looking direction until Cubase 6.5. Which is great BTW.

Cubase 7 started a new GUI direction (going over the top - new fashion), making it more “childish” IMO.

Since I joined here I have read many of the threads regarding the new mixer, and just have to agree on the Hovering thing/issue in the mixer. Awful design.

I find the GUI much improved! I have my colours set to a plesant… not too vivid colour selection which is easy to work with for many hours. ( similar to Logic 5.5.1 on Windows back in the day) :wink: