Cubase 8 is (no longer) a pain to work with

After the short honeymoon, I’ve now been working with Cubase Pro 8 for several weeks, I have to say it’s very painful.

  • Key editor scrolling/zooming focus: when I’m editing in the piano roll/key editor the zooming and scrolling functions stop working until I click in the key editor area. For instance, I’m used to zoom in and out horizontaly with ctrl + mouse wheel. When I select some midi notes, I adjust the velocity using ctrl + shift + dragging the mouse up or down. After that I won’t be able to zoom in and out again using ctrl+wheel or scrolling until I click in the key editor area, thus loosing the note selection. It’s very time consuming to have to select the notes again to continue editing them. I have found other situations where scrolling horizontally or zooming is unresponsive until I click in the project area or the key editor area to ‘activate’ focus again.

-Always on top: I have deselected always on top in the preferences menu, yet cubase keeps opening plugins with always on top selected, leading to all kinds of display bugs (dialog boxes hidden behind the plugin and unaccessible, cubase beeing unresponsive until I deselect “always on top” in the plugin again and so on). And of course the plugin desappearing behind the mixer. This window management is not sorted out, yet it has been advertised as an improvement in CP8 commercial, in fact it’s the complete opposite and I find it worst than Cubase 7.5.

I hope steinberg will fix these scrolling/zooming glitches and this window management/always on top failure otherwise CP8 workflow will be a downgrade from C7.5.

Key editor zoom
#This makes sense since the same controllers can influence any number of different Zoom targets. By clicking on the target, the prgm knows what it is the user wants to influence.?

agree … i’m tired to be a “beta tester” ! every years we have to pay for … too many bugs

" It’s very time consuming to have to select the notes again to continue editing them."

ctrl + click gives back the focus to the key-editor (etc.) window, without loosing the selection, or am I missed something?

deselecting always on top seems working on win8.1

Thanks for the tip with ctrl+click, works great!! But I didn’t need to do that in cubase 7.5. Anyway it’s good to know that.


As for “always on top”, it’s a disaster on windows 7 Professional 64bits. I hope they’ll fix this soon.

No one has to be a “beta tester” if they wait to buy after a demo is released. Cubase is more expensive but you don’t get the latest fashion week clothes to fit and/or look divine if you aren’t size 12 and one eats size 20 food and are too old (I’m talking computers and not people exactly).

Are you on Windows? If so, then this issue may be related to a long-standing limitation of Windows that requires you to click into the different windows and sections of an application’s interface for the mouse to gain focus (and to be able scroll the items in a particular column, etc.).

Try the free X-Mouse Button Control utility. It has a lot of features you probably don’t need. But the one setting “Hover gains focus” (or something to that effect) should allow you to hover over a control in Cubase 8 and scroll the value up and down without having to click into the window.

Hope this helps.

It is because he is on windows, but not for the reasons you state. It’s because they implemented a quasi Mac UI instead of a Windows UI. It’s a total disjointed mess on Windows.

This my friend, this = +100000

Are they trying to be, iThis and/or iThat fashionly up to date? On Windows?
Whatever they have been thinking, it is a GUI mess and a window handling still way off IMO.

I might think I’ll join that Hovering is bad club of yours. What’s that all about?

I agree that the new Mac-like global menu bar is UI train wreck. What could Steinberg possibly have been thinking putting the menus in the window titlebar? This violates every UI convention and best practice there is on the Windows platform. That would be fine if it solved a problem that couldn’t be solved in any other way. But there are in fact much better (and completely standard) ways of managing multiple windows and menus. This was a really bad decision.

However, having said that, I think the mouse scroll wheel focus issue is actually a limitation of Windows that can be addressed with a third-party utility.

Thank you for this I will try it and see how well it works.

I am wondering how much of this is to prepare for the ubiquitous use of tough screens.
+1 patclub - I too find the process of editing is a bit more tedious, especially the loss of scrolling functions.

Educate us on UI conventions. First I’ve seen any reference to that. I’d like to know how much of a “train wreck” it is. And why. I mean the programmers at Steinberg haven’t just come out of kindergarten and they might just have noticed a “train wreck” in the UI. At least one of the senior programmers from junior high school would have pointed something out? :mrgreen:
This design could be that for a long time Cubase had problems with the Windows and midi application (Pro Tools abandoned Windows at one time and went completely Mac didn’t it?). This could be a way around that or something like that and maybe not there entirely for the good of the UI itself. I believe it’s there because they have found a way to do it and can do it.
It’s a half educated guess and like anyone’s take on what blew up the Twin Towers it is arguable.

Also, these
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465424.aspx

Basically, there is a reason why the taskbar works the way it does. Bypassing it to create your own “app manager” (The C8 Main toolbar), jacks up that concept completely. If you have other programs open, C8 interferes with them. All that fuss and it still didn’t fix the Z-Order problem, which by the way is built into the Windows UI Framework capabilities with a simple ID call. Also, the old MDI was incorrectly done as well. All of that resizing could have been avoided even with the old windows MDI setup. As I’ve said before, we just replaced one bad MDI interface with another bad MDI interface. I’m assuming this is to keep the same code working across Mac and Windows. If I’m correct on that, then it’s an absolutely horrible idea as far as I’m concerned. The UI will never work properly if they keep trying to shoehorn in concepts between environments. I personally can’t stand the Mac UI. Having the MAC concept on Windows is even worse.

Yeah the new Windows UI for Cubase 8 is a mess. Using it is a massive pain, but the increased performance and functionality is almost worth it.

I very much appreciate what Steinberg is trying to accomplish, but it’s not working properly yet. A real shame.

Hey, I like C8 as a program, although I still Mix in 6.5. No one should take my rants as some kind of attack on Steinberg. But, the only way things get addressed is if people call it like they see it. I’m not trying to insult anyone at Steinberg at all. However, I am saying their ARE conventions that have been ignored. And, those conventions matter. I’ll still be using C8 for recording and composing. It’s a great program. But, I’ll also continue to voice my opinions about usability.

I totally agree on the ignored conventions. If I wanted to use Cubase in a Mac setting, I’d use it on my Mac. I prefer to work in Windows and am very comfortable with the general Windows conventions, so to have that changed so clumsily really does introduce a negative vibe to established workflow.

I mean yeah I could say that it just takes getting used to, and that would be the case if not for the UI bugs. I have a feeling that the new title bar and all that will remain in the program past the updates even after they fix those bugs.

Thanks for the input JMCecil, I understand better why CP8 is so buggy now. And if these bugs are due to Steinberg ignoring Windows conventions then I’m sorry to say this is a very non professional release. If they choose to have a PC version and a Mac version of Cubase, then it’s their resposability to make both usable. A lot of companies choose to concentrate their efforts on one platform only, but if they do both, they have to do both well.

I have been having really weird bugs with the menu bar: it becomes blank, the menus disappear but when I click with the mouse on that blank menu bar the dropdown menu open like it should. It doesn’t happen always though, it comes from time to time.

I love Cubase Pro 8, it has great features that I like, but this window/display/always on top buggy behaviour is really screwing everything up. I hope SB will find a way to make it work on PC and Mac, as I’m very happy with windows, and I will switch my DAW before switching to Mac OS (because of the price mostly).

I think you are misusing the word “bug”. A bug is a feature or process that doesn’t perform a known and testable input/output pair. A lot of the window idiosyncrasies are not viewed as bugs. But simply a known set of operations based on how the UI is implemented. They don’t stop any testable operation from taking place.

I don’t bring this up to be pedantic, but I see the “C8 is full of bugs” statements a lot. Actually C8 is not really all that buggy. It has usability flaws that hopefully improve for sure.

I have been having really weird bugs with the menu bar: it becomes blank, the menus disappear but when I click with the mouse on that blank menu bar the dropdown menu open like it should. It doesn’t happen always though, it comes from time to time.

Perfect example of “not a bug” (assuming I know what you are describing) … This is due to the way Windows proper handles open applications conflicting with how the C8 main menu bar handles open window instances. So, technically is “working as designed”. That design just happens to suck.