Score Editor ↔ Expression Maps: are the reported issues on the roadmap?

Cubase
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Dear @Matthias_Quellmann, @PaulWalmsley and Steinberg team,

I’d like to open this thread as a consolidated follow-up on two issues I reported
some time ago regarding the interaction between Expression Maps and the new
Score Editor in Cubase 15.

Both threads received community input, but neither has had any official feedback for several months now:

In short, the two reports concern:

  1. Attribute articulations behaving incorrectly in the Score Editor when driven
    through an Expression Map.
  2. Expression Map symbols not staying in sync with what the Score Editor
    displays, so the notation and the playback data no longer describe the same
    musical intention.

My question here is not to re-open the technical discussion — that is already documented in the two threads above, and I’m glad to supply projects, Expression Maps, screenshots or short screen recordings on request.

What I would like to ask is simply about status and process:

  • Have these reports been reproduced and logged internally as defects?
  • Is work on them planned for an upcoming maintenance update, or should users
    consider them long-term issues and plan their workflow around them?

I ask because the answer genuinely changes how I work. Expression Maps combined
with the Score Editor are the core of my daily workflow: I need one Cubase project to produce both a convincing playback mockup and a score that is already correct and readable at the sketch/production stage. To be clear, I do not expect the Score Editor to replace Dorico — I refine and finalise all my scores in Dorico, and that is where the engraving work belongs. What I need from Cubase is that the notation and the playback data describe the same musical intention while I am composing, and that what I hand over to Dorico is consistent.

When the two representations drift apart, the workaround is manual duplication of work on
every single project.

I hope I may also express a concern, respectfully.
Users who have been with Cubase for a long time will remember bugs in the previous Score Editor that remained unresolved for years — the glissando symbol behaviour being the most often cited example — and were effectively never fixed, but rather superseded
when the new Score Editor arrived.

The new Score Editor is a very welcome investment, and precisely for that reason it would be reassuring to know that issues reported early in its life are being tracked and addressed, rather than accumulating until some future rewrite.

A short official reply — even just “reproduced, logged, no ETA” — would be very
helpful.

Knowing that a report has been received and registered makes a real difference to those of us who depend on these features professionally.

Thank you for your time and for the work on the new Score Editor. :folded_hands:

Best regards,

Luigi.

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Adding a related observation as another affected user: I’ve also run into inconsistent behavior between Attribute-mode and Symbol-mode articulations when exporting MIDI data downstream (Symbol-mode articulations don’t generate a text/lyric marker at export, while Attribute-mode ones do). It’s a slightly different angle from what’s reported above, but points to the same general area — the Score Editor / Expression Map link not being fully consistent depending on articulation display mode. Would be very helpful to know if this is being tracked as part of the same investigation, or as a separate item. Thanks for the detailed write-up above, Luigi — hoping this gets an official status update.

3

I have logged the first issue and the second issue appears to be fixed in C15.0.30.

4

Thanks very much @PaulWalmsley !
I hope to see this fixed in the next release!

There is also another rather annoying bug (I’ll create a dedicated thread for it): if you create a custom layout by selecting certain tracks and setting the instrument type, then exclude one of the tracks from being displayed in the layout, all the other instruments lose their instrument-type settings. For example, an Acoustic Guitar is changed into a Percussion Drum Kit.

To reproduce the bug:

  • Create a template with orchestral tracks.

  • Open the Score Editor and create a new layout.

  • Select the tracks to be displayed.

  • Set the instrument type for each track.

  • Exclude some of the tracks you previously selected.

  • The other instruments will lose their settings. When you open the window for selecting the instrument type, it will appear unchanged; however, if you click on it, you will see that the software has actually assigned a different instrument, and everything is lost in the score.

Thank you very much for your reply and for all the work you are doing!

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Thank you for taking the time to set out the individual steps, however I have tried your steps and I can’t reproduce, so please could you add very specific details (eg ‘select violin, violin 2, viola, change viola to sax, add violin 1 and sax to new layout’). I think this is the ‘Instruments Changing’ issue that is mentioned on another thread, and I think it depends on an exact sequence of operations. Please respond on that thread: Score Editor: instruments randomly changing on their own - #40 by Valmer

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Hi @PaulWalmsley ,
Many thanks!
I’ll try to gather more specific details about this bug and report them in the relevant thread.

Thanks!