Mouse wheel speed in Cubase is a mess (macOS)

Cubase
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If you work in Cubase in a Mac and you ever used the infamous Apple Magic Mouse, you know that it’s an abomination that is only great for one use only, and that’s scrolling. Scrolling is a pleasure, but everything else about it is a disgrace. I still remember the pain in my hand and arm after using it for several hours, back when I still used it, because one day I said enough is enough.

As everything that is an Apple accessory, it’s grossly overpriced, costing several times more than a simple Logitech PC mouse that lasts longer, same for their Magic keyboards.

Unfortunately, as usual Apple expects everybody to use their mouse, so if you want to use anything else, you have to rely on 3rd party software to make it work in a half decent way, because Apple doesn’t provide more than tracking and wheel speeds.

That said, it seems to me that Cubase (12 and 13 seems to be the same), takes the system tracking speed and multiplies it, especially when you’re in the key editor. It’s like Cubase doesn’t get the mouse wheel speed from the system, it just dictates its own speed, and that speed is fast as hell, and very difficult to work with.

This is in part because it assigns different speeds to vertical and horizontal scrolling. For example, vertical scrolling (moving the mouse wheel without any modifier keys) is one speed. That speed is a bit too fast, but it’s tolerable.

Now, that’s vertical scrolling. Horizontal scrolling should be the same speed, but it’s not. Vertical scrolling has a bit of an acceleration curve. So when you start moving the mouse wheel a little bit and slow, it doesn’t move the grid too much.

However, horizontal scrolling (pressing shift and moving the mouse wheel), doesn’t have this acceleration curve. If you move the wheel just one tick, it moves horizontally in huge steps. Move it a little more, and you’re like 20 bars ahead or before, depending on which direction you moved it.

Now, if you zoom (pressing Cmd and moving the mouse wheel for horizontal zoom, or Shift+Cmd and moving the wheel for vertical zoom) seem to follow the same acceleration curve as vertical scrolling (moving the wheel without any modifier keys).

So it’s very disconcerting working this way, because in MIDI programming you have to use these four mouse operations all the time, moving up and down, left and right, and zooming in and out in both directions.

But moving horizontally is one of the things you use the most, but it’s very hard to program your brain to scroll one way vertically and then another way horizontally, at least as far as speed goes.

Does that make sense?

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I’m surprised nobody replied to this. It’s obvious to me that at least in macOS, the mouse parameters are taken over by some driver that Steinberg has coded in Cubase, and totally disregards the mouse wheel settings, whether they are the basic settings in macOS, or if you have something extra like Steermouse or Mos.

But even if you disable those two 3rd party apps, the mouse wheel in Cubase is a mess. I’m constantly overshooting the place I want to be. I had initially titled this as a problem in the key editor, but honestly it’s everywhere in the Cubase GUI. It’s in the key editors, both the one in the bottom panel and the one that opens in a separate window, but it’s also in the main project area where you have all the tracks.

I find it hard to believe that nobody else is annoyed by this constantly.

Now, some developers put a configuration file that is not part of the main settings but it’s there for people who want to tweak the program more and know what they’re doing. Is there nothing like that in Cubase? Are all the settings in the regular settings and that’s it?

1 Like
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Totally agree. Magic mouse is unusable with Cubase. It’s a great mouse, the best one for DAWs because of it’s horizontal scrolling, but it’ totally messed up in Cubase. Cubase has very strange relationship with pointing devices. On Windows mouse scrolling in Cubase is reversed and there os no native way to change this behaviour. Even with third party options when you flip the scrolling direction it flips also in Melodyne which I use all the time.

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Yes. I switched from PC to MacBook about 3 years ago, and I spend more time trying various 3rd party mouse and scroll apps to make Cubase “navigation” and parameter controls as smooth as on windows.
tried switching to Logic but learning it thoroughly as good as I know Cubase will take a long time.
So thinking of switching to Windows Laptop

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I just don’t understand why Cubase and any other app needs to change mouse scrolling parameters to their own, instead of just using the ones setup in the OS. What’s the advantage for it?

And if they want to change them, then at least give the options to control how much it changes. I’m really tired of of scrolling in and out of the timeline and having that excessive acceleration that engages after moving the mouse wheel just a bit.

The other option is to use Apple’s Magic Mouse, but it sucks for everything except scrolling. If they made that same mouse but taller and with a better tracking laser, then it would be the perfect mouse. But the laser is garbage, and if you have even a tiny dust particle or dog hair that gets below it, the tracking goes to hell and you have to blow into that hole at the bottom and clean the pad.

That’s something you have to do with every mouse, but maybe once or twice a day, with the Magic Mouse it’s once an hour at least. And on top of that, it’s so low that after one day of using it, your hand and arm hurts.

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Logitech Mx Master FTW
The software doesn’t feel like spyware and you won’t even see it. Allows you to customise on a per application basis…

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Well, having seen the abomination that Logitech software has turned into for the past few years, I wouldn’t install anything Logitech on my Mac. Which sucks because they do make some great hardware, some of it very inexpensive. But that Logitech G-Hub thing, OMG, what a piece of garbage!! I have a Logitech C920 webcam that I barely use, but I bought a small webcam software so I wouldn’t have to install that G-Hub thing or the other one they have for it.

Plus, having searched for that mouse, if you like it, good for you, but I know I would absolutely hate it. I don’t like giant mice, especially with lots of buttons.

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that’s fair enough.
For a long time I didn’t have the software installed but it’s actually very light and slick and useful. creating custom keys for the mx keyboard and cubase functions on mouse.

I think the MX master is one of the most popular mice (mouses) out there.