My Cubase projects normally consist of MIDI tracks and rack instruments, the instrument count rarely exceeding six. I am now working something that will require 20 or more rack instruments and am seeing some serious deficiencies in the instrument rack UI and workflow.
First, something I’ve always wanted: the ability to reorder instruments in the rack – wanted it before, really want it now.
Next, the minimize/maximize height behavior of rack instrument windows. Why can’t we have a Minimize-All button? If you’ve got a long list of instruments and you want them all minimized, you must do that one at a time – very tedious!
Finally, there’s this. When you select a MIDI track, the corresponding rack instrument window is maximized, which is very nice indeed. But select another MIDI track and there’s no cleanup. The previously maximized window stays large and the just-selected one is made large. Pretty soon you can only see maybe a half dozen instrument windows in the display because they’ve all been made large. At very least, if we could turn off the maximize-on-MIDI-track-select behavior, that would be an improvement.
i dont see that behaviour in my cubase 15, neither the order of the tracks in the project follow the rack-instrument, nor the visibility tool does hide the rack instruments in the right panel
the track instruments, yes, they do follow the order in the project, however not the rack-instruments
yes, but everytime you select a miditrack or intrument track in your project, the height of the selected track-instrument or rack-instrument gets expandend, you cannot disable that.
i prefer to have the “VST QUCIK Controls für nur einen Slot anzeigen”, so than at least just one stays expanded and as soon as you select another one, it minimize again. thats better than having to push the QC button at the top all the time
I normally use the rack window for only three things.
Adding a virtual instrument - full-height/minimized not an issue here.
Showing the instrument UI (i.e. invoking edit). This is usually only needed when the instrument is driven by a MIDI send, because AFIK that’s the only way you can do it. Otherwise I usually invoke the edit operation from the MIDI track in the project window.
Diagnosing why an instrument is making no sound - i.e. seeing if MIDI is getting to the proper destination, or matching a MIDI track with an instrument if I’ve been lazy with my labeling.
An expand/collapse-all is sufficient for the items 2 and 3, so I’m delighted to discover that the ability is there. Thanks, Buer!
Just for the record: yesterday the cleanup was happening. I have no idea what was different between the two sessions, but I wasn’t smoking something when I spotted this behavior the first time. Hopefully this is one of those “works most of the time” issues.
