I wish Steinberg would spend as much time fixing bugs as they spend coding new features to release new versions. Because this has been a bug since I remember using Cubase, starting with version Pro 12.
I’m talking about the focus of the key editor going back to the beginning when you deselect a track in the Visibility pane in the key editor. Say I’m here, around bar 95:
So far so good. The green MIDI notes are the guitar. Still at bar 95. But now I don’t need the guitar anymore, so I deselect it, and for no reason at all, I’m at bar 0:
Why? The playhead hasn’t changed. I haven’t moved to bar 0, in which case, the key editor showing me the area around bar 0 would make sense. But why does it have to go back to bar 0, every single time, when I deselect a track?
Now, I can’t remember the first time I reported this, but it was years ago, and nothing has been done about it. The workaround of pressing the F key twice is just not acceptable. It’s terribly annoying.
Why can’t this bug be fixed? It’s been years already.
I agree the multi-part key editor is infuriating. I’m surprised more people haven’t brought this up, because at least to me, it’s unusable.
SB will undoubtably say it’s not a bug, it’s a consequence of a few different (infuriating) behaviours of multipart editing and how midi parts and the key editor in general works.
I had to create some absolutely bonkers PLE to navigate around all these issues, and also to incorporate a workflow from logic which I much prefer, which is to easy switch back and forth between your selection of multiple parts (say your string section) and one single instrument.
There’s a few things you need to understand about how the M-P key editor works, and need to have the left panel open to see what’s going on. You also have an active track as well as an active part, and unfortunately the issue is a combination of different things happening with both.
The key editor cannot have no active part - if there is no part available in the section of the song you’re zoomed in on, it will move focus to ‘find’ an available part.
The active ‘track’ also doesn’t remain active when making new tracks visible. It will always change to the lowest track in a folder or group when new tracks are added. Likewise if removing tracks, it defaults to the topmost track of tracks which are still visible.
For example I have 2x string sections - except the 2nd section has no bass part in this particular part of the song. If I were to enable the CSS section - because the bass track would become the active track (it’s the lowest/last track in a newly visible folder) - the editor will also go and ‘find’ a part on this track, moving the key editor to somewhere else on the timeline.
There’s more issues that I can’t remember right now, and like I said is a combination of strange behaviour.
The best thing to do first of all is to use the locators and visibility config ‘show only tracks with data between the locators’ in the project window. The left pane of the key editor reflects tracks that are visible in the project, so if they’re hidden, the key editor doesn’t interact with them. Showing any tracks with data doesn’t work for me as I use midi flags, and so every track has a part at the beginning of the project. What I do is move the locators to the section I’m working on and use the locators.
You also just need to understand all the quirks and adjust your workflow, because I highly doubt they will change this.
It’s classic SB over engineering and adding features without thinking about how to actually work with it. That being said, I also don’t see many others complaining about it so who knows… Have a look at logic at just a really simple but effective way of editing multiple parts.
Yes, this behavior is indeed infuriating and a productivity killer as I’m constantly hunting through my project to see where Cubase has thrown me.
Thanks @jonny.turner487 for your suggestions; I’m going to give them a try.
Another annoying thing about the Key Editor is that after you close the window and go back to the Track View, all the tracks you just worked on are all record-enabled, so you have to waste more time manually disabling them.
Additionally, all the clip images of the tracks you just worked on are all jumbled, so you have to spend more time running the arrow cursor over them to correct that problem.
The whole thing feels beta and, knowing SB, will never be corrected. I wish they would take the time to do things right, but that is not their way.
Another annoying thing about the Key Editor is that after you close the window and go back to the Track View, all the tracks you just worked on are all record-enabled, so you have to waste more time manually disabling them.
If you go into Settings → Editing, and enable the preference “Track selection follows event selection” then you can just select another part which will then only rec enable that one single track. I would always have the pref on anyway.
Additionally, all the clip images of the tracks you just worked on are all jumbled, so you have to spend more time running the arrow cursor over them to correct that problem.
I think I know what you mean. All the midi parts are blacked out/highlighted, like they’re selected. But they’re actually not and you run your mouse over to unhighlight them. This doesn’t always happen to me. At the moment it’s not but has in the past. Yes I believe it’s just janky/buggy GUI but I’ll see if I can replicate it again.
I may take some videos of all the issues as for a while I was gaslighting myself into thinking it must be a me problem, as I never saw anyone mention it
I know that, and now I realize it might be part of the problem, about how you say it will move focus to find an available part. This is what I mean.
When I download a MIDI file from Musescore and other websites, usually each MIDI track is not one part, but several, if that instrument has data at specific parts. Something like this:
If I’m composing something, I would do it the same way, it’s faster and easier for me that way. But I see the problem. In the visibility pane, I can select as many tracks as I want, and the focus will not change, but if I deselect just one, most times it will, like you say, move focus to find an available part. Well, that part is in the track that is selected. By this I mean selected by clicking on the name, in addition to clicking on the checkmark area for that track. That leaves the name of that track underlined, and it’s the active track that you want to edit.
Doing some tests with the project above in the first version, the one before I merged all the parts in each track, it seems to me that the focus in the key editor, if you uncheck a track by clicking on its checkmark, if that track was not the priority track, it won’t move the focus. But if you had clicked on a track to make it the active one to work on it, but you’re going back and forth between two tracks, and you deselect that active track, it will shift focus to the beginning of the other track that you had selected. If you have several selected, then it will set one of them as active, and switch focus to the beginning of that track, but to the bar that has the first MIDI part.
To illustrate this pointless and annoying behaviour:
Here I have these tracks with MIDI parts in different places:
As you can see, it opens at bar 60, which is where that specific part begins. Now I’m going to select the Grand Piano. Note that it shifts the timeline to bar 93, where the piano part begins:
It shifts focus to the very beginning, because the Violins track starts at bar -1 (in this project the beginning was set to bar 0, I want my keyswitches to begin before the first note, so I set a project offset).
What’s the point of this behaviour? It doesn’t make any sense. Does it make any sense to anyone here? I don’t pretend to know everything, I know I’m just an old guy studying this, and everyone here probably knows a lot more than I do, so perhaps there is a good reason why this is setup the way it is. The guys at Steinberg are not lazy or dumb, in fact Cubase is one of the best programs I have ever used in the 30+ years I’ve been using computers, but I can’t find any reasoning behind this behaviour.
Even if I worked with several MIDI parts per track, meaning to have parts only when the instrument is being played, it still wouldn’t make any sense. It would still switch the focus back and forth (I tried many different tracks and it shifts all over the place depending on where the part is. Why would anyone need to work on editing MIDI notes anywhere but the area they scroll to manually? This usually is the area around the playhead, but not always. I may want to scroll to a different area and edit things here and there like I normally do,
The working area has to be exactly where I want it to be, not jump around like a jumping bean wherever it wants, just because I selected or deselected a track. I know this is a music program, but I’m a videographer, so I know my fair share of video editing programs, and the thing those and DAWs have in common are tracks. Tracks are universal to many creative programs.
Well, in DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere and all the NLEs I know, if you deselect a track, the timeline doesn’t jump to another point. It’s ridiculous. But that’s my opinion, if anyone here knows that this is the way it is for a good reason, please educate me.
I would also like to add that at least in Fender Studio Pro, selecting or deselecting tracks in the key editor doesn’t move the focus at all. I can be working on a specific area, and select and deselect tracks like crazy, and the focus doesn’t move an inch. It’s exactly where I want it to be.
