I thought with the new update there would be some way to address this, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
If you’re using PLE to do a bunch of copy/pasting of events across tracks, you’re going to run into situations where it starts dropping commands because they’re being executed too fast. There needs to be a way to slow things down. Like, add a “delay” or “sleep” command or something.
There’s no reason users should be prevented from enjoying all these great new features Steinberg has worked so hard to implement simply because the software insists on doing everything so fast that it can’t help but trip over its own feet. “Sleep x milliseconds” will fix everything.
Also, PLE isn’t refreshing its internal list of selectable macros in the Pre and Post slots. If you create a new macro and want to see it in PLE, you need to restart Cubase entirely. That should probably be addressed.
I believe it’s both. Macros can process commands faster than Cubase can successfully execute them. But, PLE can also trigger macros, and macros can trigger PLE commands. It’s not very hard to start chaining together commands from either source in a manner that produces inconsistent execution.
So…6 of one, half-dozen of the other, I guess.
As someone with programming experience, instruction execution speed always needs to be taken into account whenever you’re going to toy with providing scripting features to the end user. A computer’s default state is to execute functions faster than an application can reasonably be expected to keep up with. So, that needs to be addressed somehow if you care about providing that end user with a consistent feature experience. Thankfully, it should be trivially easy to implement a “sleep” or “do nothing” command into the PLE and macro systems, and that’s really all that needs to be done.
Now, whether Steinberg gets around to doing this in a timely manner (or at all) is anyone’s guess.
For anyone else who may be struggling with this issue, adding chains of useless commands in your macros or PLE presets will help A BIT. I’ve found that toggling snapping on/off over and over before a particularly problematic command can slow things down a little bit. It’s a crappy workaround that only gets you from “almost never works” to “mostly kinda works,” but it’s better than nothing.
If you’re on a Windows machine and you have both the time and the scripting chops, you can assign each command or PLE preset to a unique hotkey combination and then use AutoHotKey to trigger them at a more reasonable speed. This will produce results that are 100% consistent - but it’s a royal fking pain the the @ss.
So macros. PLEs without key commands are okay. Yes, I use ahk quite a bit, but over the past few years it has become less necessary.
This is an area of the program that hasn’t been modernized, yet, and this is a very well known fault. I’m of the opinion that this will be addressed though. They plan in years, I’m sure the devs and project planners are discussing Cubase 13 and beyond already.
Using sleep timers and magic numbers is always going to be an inferior solution to just having the scriptable commands happen in a strict serial order. If they are happening on different threads, you need a rendezvous.