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.

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I tried many different mice and trwckbals and none of them can help enough. Steinberg just have to fix this

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Have you guys tried Linear Mouse app? It works pretty good for tweaking mouse parameters.

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A tip from the future: There are apps like “Mac Mouse Fix” which hook into the scroll wheel behaviour of your hardware and macOS. I use it to smooth out the jerky steps of my step-based scroll Wheel to make the behaviour fluid like with the Magic Mouse. However, I noticed that this can screw with the zoom behaviour in Cubase. I had to disable the CMD shortcut in Mac Mouse Fix to enable the horizontal zoom in Cubase, for example.

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Cubase on a Mac doesnt use the scroll settings from logitech. How is this topic not being discussed much? I just switched to a mac after using cubase on windows for 23 years and the scrolling behavior on mac is pretty awful so far. I’m having the exact same issues as the OP.

I suspect most users have always just used mac or PC and are just used to the way it is…but coming from pc to mac the scrolling is just awful.

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You know, I can’t say I just switched to PC just because I just built a monster PC with Cubase Pro in mind (192 GB of RAM for VSTis). I prefer macOS a hundred times to Windows for so many reasons. I can’t make a blanket statement like “Macs are better” because they are not better for everyone. In fact, the reason why I built a PC instead of getting a Mac Studio M3 Ultra is because in current Macs, as amazing as they are with its Apple Silicon SoCs, you pick the amount of RAM and you’re stuck with it. So a new Mac Studio with the RAM I wanted would’ve cost me $8k, while a PC comparable in speed but with 4 NVMe SSDs cost half as much.

And I still love my Mac Studio M1 Ultra with its pitiful 64 GB of RAM, but the operating system is far superior to Windows, except on one major thing: the mouse. I don’t know what it is about Windows, but when I move the mouse in Windows, which is a Logitech keyboard/mouse combo that costs $20 and is better than anything else out there, it feels like I’m really in control of the pointer.

With my Mac Studio and previous Macs, there’s simply no mouse that makes me feel that way. Perhaps it’s the acceleration curve, but I bought software that takes over the mouse driver (if it’s not the Magic Mouse) and allows you all kinds of fine tuning. Still didn’t feel as good as in Windows. I spent days trying to fine tune, I connected Bluetooth mice, USB mice with the receiver connected to an USB extension cable so the receiver for the mouse would be two inches from it and avoid any possible interference. Still didn’t feel good. Even the same exact mouse feels weird in macOS. I just don’t get it. And this mouse in Windows, I don’t use any Logitech control panel because Logitech made a huge change a few years back and their software became terrible, bulky and buggy.

And don’t get me started on that piece of crap that is the Apple Magic Mouse, the absolute king of smooth scrolling and the worst choice for everything else. It’s just the worst quality mouse with a great pad on top. But one tiny spec of dust and the mouse pointer jumps a mile away. Apple makes great computers, phones and tablets. Their small stuff, not so good. The Magic mouse and keyboard, the Apple TV 4K remote are good looking but flimsy pieces of crap. That’s where they drop the ball.

So if there’s one good thing about using PCs, it’s that, the mouse. However, I think the code in Cubase that controls part of the mouse movement needs some work on Windows as well, because some things in Cubase Pro 14 still feel kind of weird, like it doesn’t respect the scrolling speed set in the system, and one thing that annoys me and this is Cubase because it happens in both Windows and macOS, is that horizontal scrolling only works if Cubase is in focus, it doesn’t detect the pointer over the project window or key editor if it’s not in focus, so if you scroll, it’s only vertical. Once you click somewhere in that window to give it focus, then you have both.

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Currently switched to Logic because of:

  1. Scrolling issues
  2. Tools switching bug
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Interesting. Even with these scrolling issues, I’ll take Cubase any day to Logic Pro. I mean, to zoom in and out, if I remember correctly, you have to press Option+Cmd and move the mouse wheel, but scroll back to zoom in and scroll forward to zoom out. Very confusing for me. There should be some kind of law when it comes to software that scroll forward is always zoom in and backward is out.

The only thing I miss about Logic is the ability to select a group of MIDI notes, press Shift+T and enlarge or compress that group to anything I want. Hard to fathom why such a thing is not present in Cubase, when Cubase is the kind of MIDI editing, with so many great features, but this one keeps being neglected.

Now, what tools switching bug do you refer to? I’ve never had any problem with that.