Key Ed, Chord Track Color labels are blank

This has been happening for several versions and I keep thinking it will get fixed, but it doesn’t. So…

In the Key Editor when setting the Notes to be colored based on the Chord Track the different colors have their descriptive labels blank. In earlier versions (pre ???) they were labeled to indicate what they meant. This absence is particularly problematic for new users of Cubase.

Below is how it looked in Cubase 7.5 and now in 12.

image

image

Hm… I’m not seeing that in 12, nor in 11. Here’s 11:
image

Is it possible that your graphics card/driver has something to do with this? It’s just a hunch – maybe a worthwhile experiment would be to fiddle with driver versions, or if you have both on-board graphics and a graphics card, switching between them. (obviously you must have deleted prefs during this long period of time.)

My setup is super simple, using onboard graphics

It looks like this to me in Cubase 12:

I’m actually not sure how you opened the old Chord Track Colors window. Maybe it has to do with old preferences?

Try running Cubase in safe mode (Ctrl + Shift + Alt while it’s starting up) and temporarily disable your preferences.

Yikes, that window is totally new to me. I’d been meaning to install Cubase on my office PC under the new license and this got me to actually do it. And this new window is what shows up there. But on my DAW it shows the old version - even with with Preferences disabled. The DAW is still on 12.0.30 but I assume the change happened at the initial release of Cubase 12 since Steve is showing the old version on 11. I think I lost the labels maybe back on 10.0 or 10.5. Oddly this followed me across the migration to a new PC. So it most likely is in some of the appdata files that got copied over at the time.

As a side note, that 3rd description down seems pretty judgey to me. I’m not sure how “Unusual” things like a major minor substitution can be. And then it goes totally passive aggressive with “do the current chord and scale match?” Of course they don’t, 'cause if they did match we’d be on a different color.

After poking around I found that the Colors’ Labels are indeed in the UserPreferences.xml file. So I launched Cubase and saved a Profile of my current config. Then I shutdown Cubase and renamed UserPreferences.xml so Cubase wouldn’t find it when relaunched and create a new one. I was quite surprised that even with the new file I was still getting the old Color Window.

Think I’ll just try directly editing the .xml file next

EDIT:

Editing the file is what worked. Prior to that I tried copying the brand new UserPreferences.xml from my office PC onto my DAW. When I launched Cubase after that it had the new Color Window. Then when I applied my Profile it reverted back to the old Color Window.

Here’s how to edit the UserPreferences.xml file if anyone else needs to.

Open the file in a text editor and search for “chordColors” to find the correct section of the file. Basically we want to replace this entire member definition

I replaced all of this:

<member name="chordColors">
            <string name="SetName" value="ChordTrack Colors" wide="true"/>
            <list name="Set" type="list">
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4294901760"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4288266751"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4278190335"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4278255360"/>
               </item>
            </list>
            <list name="DefSet" type="list">
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4294901760"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4288266751"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4278190335"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4278255360"/>
               </item>
            </list>
            <int name="FixedSize" value="1"/>
         </member>

With this (which you can copy from here):

<member name="chordColors">
            <string name="SetName" value="Chord and Scale Colors" wide="true"/>
            <list name="Set" type="list">
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="None:
The pitch is not in the current chord or the current scale. This pitch adds a strong tension." wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4291590696"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="Scale:
The pitch is in the current scale but not in the current chord. A good pitch for melody that adds some tension." wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4280863893"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="Chord:
The pitch matches the current chord but is not in the current scale. Unusual - do the current chord and scale match?" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4288007208"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="Chord &amp; Scale:
The pitch matches the current chord and scale. No added tension at all." wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4280863784"/>
               </item>
            </list>
            <list name="DefSet" type="list">
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="None:
The pitch is not in the current chord or the current scale. This pitch adds a strong tension." wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4291590696"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="Scale:
The pitch is in the current scale but not in the current chord. A good pitch for melody that adds some tension." wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4280863893"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="Chord:
The pitch matches the current chord but is not in the current scale. Unusual - do the current chord and scale match?" wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4288007208"/>
               </item>
               <item>
                  <string name="Name" value="Chord &amp; Scale:
The pitch matches the current chord and scale. No added tension at all." wide="true"/>
                  <int name="Color" value="4280863784"/>
               </item>
            </list>
            <int name="FixedSize" value="1"/>
         </member>