I’m experiencing a visual issue in the MIDI Key Editor that I can’t seem to fix.
My setup:
Project background and Cycle Region have different custom colours
A MIDI event that starts at bar 10 and ends at bar 15
Cycle range: bar 5 to bar 20
The issue:
When I double-click the MIDI event and open the Key Editor, the editor background used to show three visually distinct zones:
Outside the Cycle
Inside the Cycle but outside the active event
The active event itself (a slightly different shade, making its boundaries immediately visible)
Some time ago, zone 3 stopped being visually distinct from zone 2. Now the active event area looks identical to the Cycle area, so I can no longer tell at a glance where the event starts and ends.
I haven’t knowingly changed any settings. I’ve checked Preferences > User Interface > General Colours (Editor Colours section) and Preferences > Event Display > MIDI (Inactive Note Event Intensity slider), but I haven’t been able to restore the original behaviour.
Sadly yes. Several of us have been complaining about this since day one of the update. They changed the background of the active midi part in the key editor, under the loop-cycle ruler. This has been done on purpose by Steinberg. Martin (one of the mods here) explained that it was a “bug fix” in order to make the coloring/opacity behavior of the key editor match that of the project window. He says that many people had complained and put in bug-fix requests about it. I can NOT understand what that means. I, and others, have asked for clarity on what this “bug” was, because I and at least five other people (and now you!) are having a VERY hard time now, seeing our active midi part within the key editor under the loop cycle ruler.
If you look closely at your image, where your midi part is, you can see that the background is slightly darker where the black keys are on the keyboard. It’s really subtle and hard to see. The only workaround that I have been using is changing the key editor colors to a more midrange-gray, that has the best contrast (fully dark or fully light are the WORST), but this is a weak workaround at best.
If those black-key lines were darker, that would help a lot, but I really prefer that the entire active midi part background be darker overall (like it used to be). I spent several hours updating my GPU driver, checking/deleting settings/preferences, even REINSTALLING CUBASE, thinking the update broke something for me, until I found other posts about the issue, here in this forum.
I hope and pray that Steinberg will roll back this “bug fix,” or at least offer a setting where we can get the old background back, so that we can SEE WHAT WE ARE WORKING ON in the key editor. Because this is not an upgrade, it is terrible. I already struggle with my eyesight, and this definitely did not help.
TL;DR - There’s no fix or setting for this, it’s a change Steinberg made for a perceived “bug fix.”
I see, thank you for the explanation, that makes total sense. I hope they get back to how it used to be, I feel I waste so much more time into trying to figure out where the boundaries of the event are. Fingers crossed
Just confirming that this issue persists in Cubase 15.0.30. No change whatsoever — the active MIDI part background is still indistinguishable from the Cycle region area, making it very hard to see where the event boundaries are while editing.
This has now gone through three successive updates (15.0.20, 15.0.21, 15.0.30) without any acknowledgment or fix from Steinberg. I work with large orchestral templates where I spend a significant amount of time in the Key Editor, and this visual regression directly impacts editing speed and accuracy on every single session.
I understand Steinberg considers this an intentional change for consistency with the Project window. But as others have pointed out, the Key Editor and the Project window serve fundamentally different purposes. The Project window is a high-level overview; the Key Editor is a precision editing environment. Applying the same cycle shading behavior to both without providing any independent control for the Key Editor is a usability step backwards, not a bug fix.
A dedicated preference to control cycle region opacity or the active event background color independently in the Key Editor would solve this without affecting the Project window consistency. This should not require a major redesign — just a targeted color parameter that currently doesn’t exist.
Hope this gets some attention in the next update.
