I recently set up a large scoring template in Cubase involving a few VEPro instances set up as rack instruments + midi channels for every instrument within each.
It works well for me, but of course sometimes I’d like to automate volume (and audio effects/sends etc). At first I was using the volume automation directly on the midi track which I was aware would affect CC7 / the instrument’s actual volume slider. However this led to issues I didn’t consider down the line, when opening up another project file sharing the same VEP setup (since I’m working on a film project), I was scratching my head confused why I wasn’t hearing any audio from a few instruments, where I completely forgot their volume sliders got adjusted by a previous project.
To avoid such issues I would rather leave all volumes where they are inside the instruments so VEP has an equal baseline mix, and automate on the audio I/O channels themselves under the rack instruments (which I have set to multi-outputs). Plus it will make it nicer to jump to the audio channels to add project-specific inserts/EQ etc.
I have them all beautifully set up, labelled, and organized – so it’s not that I can’t find them, however I want to figure out a quick way to jump to them in the timeline view while I have its corresponding Midi track selected. I tried digging into the filters and PLE but can’t find a solution. In an ideal world I could select my midi track for a Violin, and with a shortcut then either jump to or filter to show only the relevant I/O rack instrument track.
You could drag the output tracks out of the vienna folder and place them right below the corresponding input track. That way you only have to go up/down by one track.
You can also use the quick controls on the input midi track to control the volume and other parameters of the corresponding output track. That way you can control the volume without switching tracks (But this is unfortunately limited to 8 parameters).
Thanks! Yeah the quick controls would work great if I could match as many outputs as I have, but coming from VEPro I have them broken out into around ~32-40 per instance in my template.
Stacking each output track with their corresponding midi track could be fine, although I was messing around inside of PLE and the filters and couldn’t really find a way to toggle the showing/hiding of those tracks. Because if I were to take that approach, ideally I could create two custom filters such as: Show Only MIDI Tracks, and Show Only Audio Output tracks. MIDI Tracks was easy and not a problem inside of PLE, however there seems to be nothing in this list which will hide/show the output tracks:
I tried everything with a track operation > hide track > toggle, and can’t get those tracks to hide/show. I have observed you can manually isolate them in the filter hamburger menu dropdown, first deselecting all track types, and then selecting “Other Tracks,” but I couldn’t figure out a way to create a macro or shortcut for these menu options unfortunately.
Obviously I could deal without the filtering toggle but I think always seeing midi+output stacked together as I scroll up and down my template is going to be busy and could lead to confusion.
I did discover that with the channel inspector open, I can save my template with a certain output selected/filtered (on the left panel). I.,e. this thing:
I noticed that when I click that circled dropdown it lets me select the corresponding output track and when I select different midi tracks, the correct output will now show there (by default it was always showing the first output for every rack instrument, 1/2). After setting this up for every track, I saved my template and re-opened and lucky for me it saves that information! So this way every midi channel I select, it will always show me this track there, which for me is good enough because I can also add effects/sends/EQ quickly as I need. If I wish to automate, I can simply turn on Write mode briefly, wiggle the volume slider, which will in turn jump my arrangement to show that output track with its automation lane. The method is not perfect but I’ll take it!