Long live Generic Remote! A Glib Reflection

Cubase
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After a year or two of trying to adapt to MIDI Remote and running into all kinds of crazy problems I wanted to glibly express my gratitude to good old generic remote, which I have now transitioned back to with all my control surfaces. I had simply forgotten how good I had it!!! It’s now rock solid, never disconnects, never causes cascade Cubase crash messages, never duplicates my output ports, doesn’t corrupt my projects.

And while I’m at it, long live Mackie Control Universal! Every DAW uses it. Never crashes. Works with practically any device. Feature set is totally reliable and basically complete.

The fact is that, on my system at least, Generic Remote and MCU are simply more stable, and in some cases, more feature complete. I’m really looking forward to the day that changes, but til then, old ways are still winning. That said, major, major props to users like @bjoluc who’ve made tremendous strides getting Midi Remote close to MCU parity (though it is still not there yet), and to companies like Nektar, Softube, and Metagrid for trying to pull as much as they can from this new tech. I just wish it was as reliable as the old systems, and it ought to be as we are a few years out now.

Now bring on the “I’ve been using MIDI Remote with no problems” posts! Genuinely interested to hear where and how its working with no hitches.

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I’m using the MIDI Remote side by side with the Generic Remote. Sometimes with the same hardware controller.

As a high level rule of thumb, I still use the Generic Remote for controlling Insert FX and motorized faders (and similar). And for cases where I want different Cubase mappings for send/receive of MIDI messages.

One part of the Generic Remote got broken a little while ago, but was fixed in the following update.

Overall, the MIDI Remote is still a giant construction zone, where things seem to get added, fixed and broken with every Cubase update. And it seems that lately the MIDI Remote is mostly being kept out of the release notes.

The TypeScript scripting part seems only realistic for a small subset of users, who have superior related programming experience or extraordinary patience.

Overall, using the MIDI Remote for even mildly ambitious use cases has frequently become an exercise more akin to reverse engineering than an exercise in learning from documentation.

On the other hand, I find the stuff that consistently works in the MIDI Remote a lot more pleasant to use than in the Generic Remote.

But making backups before making changes seems easier with the Generic Remote.

So I keep muddling along by using both, the old and the new in parallel, sincerely hoping the old will stay long enough, until the new is more feature complete and stable.

Being a remote control enthusiast Cubase user continues to be an exhausting journey for me. So exhausting, that I haven’t tested yet, if some things quietly got added and fixed in 14.0.20; But I’ve bumped into something that seems to have gotten newly broken (already documented elsewhere in this forum).

I can’t shake the feeling that Steinberg’s team are somewhat overwhelmed by the ambition and complexity of the many things they are currently working on. Quite a few of the newer ideas are absolutely fantastic. But obviously not easy to fully implement.

Cubase reminds me of construction mega projects like the Elbphilharmonie. I just hope, that the end result — while delayed and much more expensive than originally thought — will also be spectacular.

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I have a different experience concerning Generic Remote and MIDI Remote.

I do agree that Generic Remote is easier to use. The spreadsheet form is very intuitive but it also lacks many things:

  • it has no touch sense capability. (essential for me to work with motor faders)
  • it can’t send meaningful feedback such as track names or values as ascii character.
  • doesn’t get the page/subpage capability so you can’t use a set of knobs for different purposes.
  • the way inserts and channel strips parameters were implemented dependent of the slot position on the track so it was unusable to me.

As for MCU protocol, i think it’s still very usable but is limited to a very strict form factor for a console that is now outdated. It made sense in the past to only have 6 characters per channel, but today graphical rgb screens have become less expensive so it doesn’t make much sense anymore.

I still think MIDI remote has a lot of shortcomings because the developers tried to address two very different problems at the same time:

  • allow a ‘noob’ user to rapidly set up a MIDI controller with a nice GUI.
  • make an API for manufacturers (and power users) to allow deeper integration.

To me, the GUI is completely useless and adds a lot of efforts in the development of a script. But there are ways to make controls without GUI, so I’m pretty satisfied with it.

Also the biggest miss for me is the auto-banking behaviour of the Mixer Bank Zone. I know many people asked for it, but I just want to have the choice to disable it.

Also, the documentation is pretty poor to be honest.

I hope that I will be able to address this problem in the near future with the introduction of the API v1.2 (which in essence is already implemented, but is yet to be finished / documented).

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(Deleted By Arthur) Arthur the irate

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I actually find the GUI pretty great. I have no intention of learning java to script this thing, so the GUI is my only option, but I find it well designed. Its frustrating that it lacks the deeper features of the API, but it still expands on the capabilities of Generic Remote, which would be all I’d really want from a new feature.

But then the unexplained Cubase crashes start happening, the script gets corrupted and I can’t duplicate pages, the disconnects, etc etc. Very quickly it’s way too much of a headache to be worth it.

As far as touch faders are concerned - yes, it’d be nice if we had a MIDI Remote script that fully replaced MCU (or better yet, if the GUI could do it), but again I’m not gonna learn java to make one myself. Meanwhile, despite very industrious work by users creating scripts to replicate MCU compatibility, key workflow elements are still missing, and frankly we shouldn’t have to expect a script that complex to be maintained by users. Steinberg should have developed something like this. They still can! And if they did, we’d have guaranteed maintenance and development and improvements to the script. Buy buying into this wonky ecosystem without Steinberg (or 3rd party) support makes no sense to me anymore when I have a totally reliable alternative in MCU and Generic Remote . The exceptions are the couple companies that have developed the scripts themselves, but even then, there are still the same problems and growing pains of the API itself, and there’s nothing 3rd parties can do to fix many of them.

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I have not looked into forum since a year and i see nothing has changed. The midi remote is still the fraud ripoff to the customers, since the release of it. Nothing happened to the midi remote editor in 3 years… yeah NOTHING, but announced that Generic Remote and MCU will be considered “legacy”… yeah yeah nice… NOT

Minor adds to the API thats it, for those hobby scripters. Still reading only about issues with that crap that it is. Fancy buttons and faders does not make it a “cool” thing or success. In a nutshell: The generic remote has quirks, but it can do the job most of the time. What can you do with the midi remote editor? A fraction of GR and thats it, not to mention MCU. For what it does, i must seriously ask here, who needs this crap? I must say for what the editor offers, if you can not do this otherwise, you probably should not sit in front of a DAW or simply just forget about it. What you should not forget is, you where hardcore ripped off.

It is also a big shame, for a developer like Steinberg, forgetting about the (midi) roots. How hard can it be, to feed a midi-controller please?

It is three decades old midi-communication that 90% deals with two digit hex numbers and they are not able to manage this. It is absolutely unbelievable and i mean that seriously. So instead of writing a tool that can properly translate Cubase internals to a midi-standard three decades old, (remember two hex digits). This alone is just incompetence, but the list of nonworking things (that worked before the midi-remote editor) is looooong, and how this shows off in real work-days scenarios, is simply a nightmare.

So they came up with JavaScript, that has nothing in common with midi-communication, unlike the GR for example. Stuff that happens in GR, happens too in the midi-world. At least understandable by artists. So even complex things are possible, as long as your hardware supports what it offers.

So Steinberg either has no developers, that could bring the midi-remote editor to a new level, or they employ people that are not able to do the simplest midi-translations, and that is exactly what it is: most controllers are just sending (again) two hex digits with a prefix and want that same thing back as a receive (if they support this). Even text is just a sysex. It is no rocket-science here involved, but probably Cubase code = Spaghetti code.

In other words, people that have no clue, how miserable and crap the current situation is. They just sit it out. IMHO they are a joke.

On the other side, there are people here in forums, that basically do their jobs, like @bjoluc did. But still, even with their work, what did we won as users? Is there anything better in comparison to GR or MCU? I dont think so. It is mostly the same thing, that it was before… applause.

To deliver something like the midi-remote (editor), without serious updates in three years and only having even more problems, shows off how this JavaScript thing is a dead horse… it is like trying to make serious music, but with Photoshop. That far off is this midi remote crap.

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