suggestions

[rixdrumz]

hi,
i have some suggestions i would love to hear some feedback on…especially from someone from steinberg.
i had posted this before but in the wrong place in the forum… sorry 'bout that but there was a problem w/ my log-in codes.

1. there is a need for a much better notebook. the current note pad is much too small. i would like to see a notepad that is easily size-able, offered some basic music notation (bar lines, repeat sign, basic rhythm notation…so you could make a basic chord chart) and somehow was accessible even if cubase wasn’t open. the great thing about cubase is the almost limitless musical potential…but that means things get pretty complex pretty fast and keeping up with the ins and outs of a project can be very difficult day to day let alone coming back to a project after a period of time.

2. i would like to have many more color choices available. 16 is not enough for most of my projects. furthermore, it would be very helpful if there was a better visual way to identify midi control tracks…something that at a glance you could tell if is a ‘send’ track’ or an fx track or any other grouping of things that you might be controlling by midi…i find myself doing more a more midi controls of parameters of the vst instruments and effects and it is very confusing to see many control lanes that look exactly alike. one solution might be for the background color of the track be different

3. i think there needs to be a glossary of the warning screens you might get as part of the basic operation manual. the glossary would include a deeper, clearer description of what the warning is about and something about what to do about it.

4 is it possible for cubase to follow what you use and don’t use in the program and then offer possible workspace designs based on that data. so the things you use most are large and obvious and thing u never use become smaller and out of the way…i never use half the things in the toolbar. furthermore i never use major sections of cubase like the scoring sections…maybe those don’t even have to be loaded in when i boot up cubase but if i need them some square is clicked and cubase reboots with that option…a leaner meaner cubase?

[vic_france]

(just very briefly)…
point#2: You can add as many colors to the main palette as you wish (apart from in the Key Editor, for the 16 MIDI channels of course )… Click on “Select Colors”, from the Color menu, then, at the bottom of the dialog window, you’ll see buttons to add/remove colors etc.

[Jarno]

@rixdrumz

1. there is a need for a much better notebook.

What I really would like is “automated notebook”: time-stamped text of what I’ve done. When I recorded this track. When I edited it and in which way … etc.

@rixdrumz

2. i would like to have many more color choices available. 16 is not enough

Personaly I have to partly disagree. For me 16 is enough. I don’t want every tract to have it’s own colour. I use colours for grouping: vocals/guitars/bass/drums/percussion/brass/winds/strings/etc … if I use my imagination hard enough I may find close to 16 goups of sounds I’m using … but only close. But anyway. 16 is artificial restriction, which shouldn’t be there and there should be as many colours as possible until more colours makes user interface cluttered.

@rixdrumz

glossary of the warning screens

Good point. Never tghought about that, since never had any problem on understanding the error messages, I’ve encountered.

@rixdrumz

4 is it possible for cubase to follow what you use and don’t use in the program and then offer possible workspace designs based on that data

-1. Definitely opposing. I just HATE all software, which thinks for me and suggest me what I should do.

[rixdrumz]

@Jarno

What I really would like is “automated notebook”: time-stamped text of what I’ve done. When I recorded this track. When I edited it and in which way … etc.

i think this is a great idea too…something that i could have used quite a bit .

@Jarno

Personaly I have to partly disagree. For me 16 is enough. I don’t want every tract to have it’s own colour. I use colours for grouping: vocals/guitars/bass/drums/percussion/brass/winds/strings/etc … if I use my imagination hard enough I may find close to 16 goups of sounds I’m using … but only close. But anyway. 16 is artificial restriction, which shouldn’t be there and there should be as many colours as possible until more colours makes user interface cluttered.

turns out you can have many colors…but my main point was when you get into midi controlling many parameters…u can end up with a bunch of tracks below your audio/instrument/midi track…currently you can’t colorize those track to anything different then the track it is modifying…it is at the heart of my sound design process.

@Jarno

Definitely opposing. I just HATE all software, which thinks for me and suggest me what I should do.

well, would u oppose having greater control over how your various work pages looked…if there was something you never used…you could remove it knowing that would be a way to recall it if needed?

[rixdrumz]

@vic_france

(just very briefly)…
point#2: You can add as many colors to the main palette as you wish (apart from in the Key Editor, for the 16 MIDI channels of course )… Click on “Select Colors”, from the Color menu, then, at the bottom of the dialog window, you’ll see buttons to add/remove colors etc.

thank you vic
any thoughts on my other suggestions?

[Jarno]

@rixdrumz

well, would u oppose having greater control over how your various work pages looked…if there was something you never used…you could remove it knowing that would be a way to recall it if needed?

No. Being able to customize things isn’t bad. But letting the software to customize for you by guessing what you want is really really bad. Stopped using Microsoft Office some time ago, since it’s trying to be so bloody smart.

But then there’s pitfalls on letting users too much freedom to customize user interface also. I’m not going to write a thesis about these matters here, though.

[Split]

@Jarno

letting the software to customize for you by guessing what you want is really really bad.

Absolutely, I want a computer to do what it’s told to do and not try to preempt or otherwise guess at my preferences.

catering to the lowest common denominator and treating us like were all stupid, maybe we are but I like to make my own errors.

[chase]

@rixdrumz

is it possible for cubase to follow what you use and don’t use in the program and then offer possible workspace designs based on that data. so the things you use most are large and obvious and thing u never use become smaller and out of the way

Oh good grief, I hope not. It’s bad enough when the supermarket moves something; don’t let Cubase behave “creatively”. Doing that would take a demented programming team … and produce a demented Cubase …

@Cubase with its new self-reconfiguring powers

AHA!

I see that in the last hundred hours of using Cubase, you’ve never recorded any audio. But I expect you’d have known roughly what to do if audio recording had been needed. Well not any more! I’ve just hidden all the menu items related to recording audio. That’s you really f***ed, next time you want to do it.

I love my new role. “Use it or lose it” - and you just LOST, sucker.

But THAT’S NOT ALL! - I made a list of all the menu items that you use most and NOW I’VE MOVED THEM!

Eveything you want to do will take so much longer now. My new powers are so much more effective than the old method of having the development team make bewildering, unfathomable changes to things that were working well.

In this video, we see a Cubase user who can’t take it any more, after Cubase has decided once again to tweak the interface to reflect recent usage. Cubase looks on to see what it’s caused. Later, members of the Cubase development team react to what’s happened …

- YouTube