I am excited about the Elgato Stream Deck Plus with four rotary knobs for remote controlling Cubase, not to mention the 8 buttons. I am new to Stream Deck but see that there is a comprehensive Cubase plugin for it for many years so I am hopeful it will allow me to accomplish what I want. I am still researching it and haven’t purchased the Stream Deck Plus yet, but maybe someone knows and can confirm if these specific functions in particular could be assigned to the 4 rotary controls:
The immediate answer is that I immediately realized the constraints of the SD+ in regards to the number of controls available.
That said, if you get the Midi plugin, Cubase Pro plugin, and MouseMove plugin, you are well on your way!
One example: I have a rotary assigned to zoom in/out horizontally or vertically. I have another rotary set to scroll all tracks or selected tracks with a push to switch.
That’s fantastic, thanks for confirming. Everyone seems to rave about these Stream Decks. I went ahead with the purchase.
I see that the rotary controls also push in/out to serve as a button like you suggest to toggle zoom vertical/horizontal. The display panel left/right swipe gesture for page scrolling frees up two of the dedicated push button switches.
Thanks for pointing out the needed plugins. I’ve already got a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot pedal controller working with Cubase, so I have some familiarity with remote control. But I am sure there is some devil in the details no less!
I got the Stream Deck + XL last week. There’s a company called SideshowFX that makes a Cubase package. I used that to set mine up. It does all the things you mentioned and more.
The preprogrammed color palette comes with a hitch. It’s setup to work with 16 colors. So if you have more than that set in your project, the colors will be wrong. I’m sure there’s a way to modify it for more, but I’m not there yet.
My favorite single button/knob items so far are zooming the timeline (by far), creating a mono track (1 button), renaming it 2 more buttons (+ custom names for each vocalist I programmed myself), quantize (MIDI notes), and returning the playhead to the zero position. I’m still exploring but those made a recording session much more enjoyable for me yesterday
Yes, the author of the MIDI plugin recently added the charge to justify the amount of time he’s spending on it. It is a required additional plug because the SideshowFX plugin uses it. They mention this in the desciption.
I understand now, thanks for clarifying. The wording with the SideshowFX plugin (in particular the last sentence, see below) left me wondering who was charging me for it since I don’t already have a copy.
Hey I just want to point out that the Stream Deck isn’t very smooth, and its keys are quite stiff, which isn’t really ideal for precise delicate work. Please check online for more info
Thanks for the fair warning - this is the first negative thing I’ve heard about Stream Deck, although I haven’t researched it very much. I still went forward and purchased it today but at least its via Amazon so its easy to return. I think its going to work for my needs because I’m not looking for a primary user interface just remote control buttons so I can record myself from behind my drum kit with getting up and down too many times!
In fairness, the keys are stiff enough that my SD+ sitting on a glass surface required a rubber mat under it to keep from sliding. I haven’t found it much of an issue since I’m using it for control purposes, not performance. I’m finding the benefits outweigh that for my purposes.
Yep, I have it too, and I have very specific colors with names so it didn’t work for me. I completely updated the profile to my liking just last week. It was a bit hacky though, but in short I edited the XML files to my own names, created new buttons in the midi remote script (click “Edit Midi Controller surface” in Cubase to grab the midi CC value, and then in streamdeck duplicate one of the buttons and change its value). I then extracted the icons and took those into photoshop, used the eye dropper on a screenshot of my colors, and shifted the hue so now all the icons match my personalized colors. I know have 32 custom color buttons that match my projects! In theory you could go for 64, 128 - but I see no value in going that deep.
In general the profile is takes a bit of hacking to customize but I’ve found it’s totally doable to create a new page and add new buttons. For example I’ve added a few of my custom macros and PLE presets, an area where I feel having Streamdeck shines.
yeah, the wording is confusing, but it’s worth every penny. I’ve actually used a few other other Slideshow FX profiles they built for other software like Adobe products, and because none of those use midi integration, they rely solely on very precise keyboard shortcuts that must match. If you have your own custom shortcuts, you’d either have to adapt to their profile or manually go change hundreds of buttons yourself.
What I love about the Cubase profile is the way it uses that midi plugin – it doesn’t care what your custom key commands are. It just worked flawlessly out of the box for me, which is great because my Cubase key commands have been highly customized over the years.
I have not (at least as of yet) delved into modifying the json input file but may consider it in the future. One concern would be conflicting with future updates and/or having to reapply changes.
That said, the MIDI plugin is well worth the meager price, even if you’re building your own StreamDeck profiles.
Likewise, the Cubase Pro profile, is a great start for much of what you need, and can be edited to suit your needs.
Yes. I should have mentioned this… because it was about $17 which bumps the price of the package up to around $60 for a Mac.
I could be wrong, but I think this is necessary since Steinberg is deprecating an older “legacy” MIDI Remote protocol, so this app helps future proof it
@wing that’s great! I did something similar… but I copied and pasted one of the SideshowFX name buttons in the Elgato software to an unused button. Then I changed the text and background pic by using the included images from SideshowFX. It was fairly painless… but I had them disappear. I found that pinning them and then unpinning them in the Elgato software seemed to stop that.
A couple more thoughts… I got the Sreamdeck + XL… which has 32 buttons and a much larger footprint. I had no issues whatsoever with it moving during button presses. I’m not sure how well the SideshowFX Cubase pack works with the smaller unit. They definitely make a separate package for the newer + XL vs. the +
Sadly, the + XL wasn’t available on Amazon yet. So you have to buy it directly from Elgato. They do throw in a free pack of alternate colored knobs. I chose purple and put one of those bad boys on the timeline zoom knob so I can find it fast and minimize errors from twisting the wrong knob.
Yeah, this is one thing that occurred to me when I modified the script for my custom colors - any updates will mean I likely have to do that again. Oh well, at least it only took about 10-15 mins.
My description was convoluted but that’s basically what I meant - copy and pasted to unused buttons and just reverse engineered how they built it. I’m not crafty enough to do anything from scratch but I agree, it was pretty painless once I figured it out.
I only have the XL but eventually I may have to upgrade to the + XL for those knobs!
I was looking at the Nektar CS12. It’s a nice controller but I already have all 3 SSL units (UF8, UF1, UC1) so it was mostly redundant. I liked the idea of controlling 3rd party plugins… but something told me the reality of controlling them would be less ideal in practice. The Stream Deck gives me more granular control and the ability to customize deeply. I can use a mouse for Fabfilter without compromise or learning curves, so Elgato (and SideshowFX) got my money. I got the bigger unit because I knew I wanted more buttons now and that wasn’t going to change. The option to add another unit later just seemed it would clutter my workspace and add more acclimating and/or troubleshooting. No regrets, so far.
