Hi all, first post here, and Happy New Year!
As the title says, Sampler Track LFO waveforms (in C11 Artist) don’t save with the rest of the project! If I change the LFO waveform to say a pulse, save the project, close it, and reopen it, it will reset to a sine wave every time. I did not realize this until tweaking an LFO in a reopened project with ~7 Sampler tracks so far, before finding out that each and every LFO was reset to a sine wave. If this has a known workaround or is obvious user error, please let me know.
The following points are less problematic than the above, but I’d still like to see if anyone else feels like these are issues.
The Inspector panel for Sampler tracks is pretty janky. No matter what’s pinned, shown, or hidden in the Inspector settings, it’s impossible to see both a volume control slider (either in the Instrument section or the Fader) and the Audio Inserts at the same time, unlike every other track type. If I’m working with inserts and need to quickly adjust the volume, I either have to fumble around in the Inspector for a couple seconds or open the Channel Settings. This may be related to the following observation; If you open the Inspector settings by clicking the topmost gear icon, the window will say “Instrument Track Inspector Settings,” while if you click the bottom gear, the window says “Sampler Track Inspector Settings.” To be fair, the Inspector settings windows are janky everywhere (having both gears open redundant “X Track Inspector Settings” windows with totally different items is also confusing for different reasons), but at least the visibility can be manipulated correctly.
The Sampler is the only track type which doesn’t allow you to specify the output routing from the Add Track window. When I add a Sampler track, I need to immediately open either the Channel Settings or the MixConsole to manually route it to the correct bus every time, unlike every other track type.
Unlike other Lower Zone features like MixConsole, audio Editor, and midi Editor, the Sampler cannot be opened as a separate window by default. It can be popped out into a window after it opens first in the Lower Zone, but even then, that window empties automatically if the Lower Zone is closed. The Sampler is currently the only thing I use the Lower Zone for; its otherwise possible to entirely avoid it, so it’s odd that Cubase requires this. Combined with some of the other quirks, this makes it seem like the Sampler track borrows functionality/code from both Instrument tracks and from Editors, leading to inconsistencies with how both normally behave on their own. I’m wondering if we’ll see the sampler just become a VSTi in C12 or something, like a lighter 1-pad Groove Agent. I personally would be a fan of the resulting consistency with the rest of the DAW.
Aside from the issues, the Sampler is a really powerful feature that I enjoy using a lot. It’s feature-rich, less resource hungry than Groove Agent, and the UI makes it really easy to get what I’m looking for quickly. So of course I want it to feel a bit more cohesive with the rest of the Cubase experience - as of now it feels like a sort of awkward hybrid feature that doesn’t quite fit into the rest of Cubase’s established paradigms. There are quirks (and an outright potential bug in the case of the LFO resetting) that I have to go out of my way to find, commit to memory, and actively work around…