I don’t know how the majority of people work with exporting audio, but when I have the Audio Mixdown window open, I am constantly annoyed that pressing Enter does not just export the selected project as MP3, WAV or whatever it’s set to, and that pressing Escape does not close down the entire Audio Mixdown window.
The current Enter and Escape key behavior seems to focus on the title of the exported track, that you can type immediately after opening the Audio Mixdown window. But you still have to click on the “Export Audio” button afterwards.
IMHO, this is unintuitive behavior, but maybe it’s just me?
Anyone is welcome to challenge me on this and why the current behavior makes sense. But if not, I think this should be a feature. Or at least there should be an option to change this behavior.
EDIT: Also, I just noticed that pressing Tab does not take you to the next menu on the list, which is weird.
I agree with this part, and this is my most common “user error” with this screen. It used to work that way in earlier versions of Cubase (not sure if this first crept in with 15 or perhaps 14).
As for the Enter key behavior you’re advocating, that would not seem a good idea to me. In particular, when I’m in the Export Audio screen, I am usually setting up multiple exports. For example, I might do a CD-quality WAV file along with multiple MP3 formats. Or I might do a 24-bit/96 kHz mix along with another at 24-bit/48 kHz. The point being I’m setting up a queue of multiple files that will be exported in one go, not just changing one specific field then exporting based on whatever was in there previously. Having Enter default to running the export, would likely result in a lot of frustration in terms of starting the operation before I was ready and needing to cancel to update the information before trying again.
What I do think, though, is that, if you tab to the Export button, so it has the focus, then hit Enter, it should do the export. (I don’t know if that actually works, and I’m skeptical in that I can’t even just tab out of the file name editing field. As it is, I just click on the button once I’ve got everything I want in that export operation queued up and ready to go.)