What does the little hand do in the ruler? Every time I want to place the cursor at a certain point in the ruler, I sometimes get the cross-hair symbol or the hand. It’s such a tiny difference between getting the hand or the cross-hair tool that its a pain in the neck. Is there any way to turn that hand off? What does it do?
The hand moves the locator range.
Thanks, KHS. I really wish it would disappear until needed. During recording and editing, if the locators are not used, the stupid hand is just in the way!
I just messed around with a located section. There is one hand that appears for setting the locator positions. After you set the range, say 24 bars, for example, an internal hand appears so you can slide the entire 24 bar range along the ruler. I suppose that has merits but you still need to be able to get rid of the internal hand when not using the locators.
For a workaround, set your locators outside song range. For example if your song starts at Bar 9 then set locators to start/end both at Bar 1, then you shouldn’t see the hand anywhere within the actual song range.
Good idea, KHS. I just noticed that the hand is gone now. I have no idea why. It’s been replaced with a pencil. My locators are side by side at the 0 marker.
The ruler is divided into two horizontal parts. The lower part is dark grey where the cross-hair symbol is displayed. The upper part is light grey where the hand or pencil appears when the mouse is hovered. I don’t mind having to stay in the lower part of the ruler to set my cursor precisely at a bar but like Microsoft, the Cubase developers make the ruler so shallow in height that it takes time to get just the right position in the ruler so the desired tool is selected. If we could resize the ruler height, that would be the best work around.
It’s too often that developers don’t think about workflow. What seems easy to them is a royal pain in the ass for everyone else!
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The pencil tool will draw a new locator range if you click-hold-drag.
Ctrl-click to set the left-hand locator, Alt-click to set the right-hand locator.
The locator/ruler area being too small at the top of the project window has been a long-running UI issue that Steingberg have yet to address. It used to be larger and thus easier to use in earlier versions.
The documentation contains lots of clues.
Yes but the issue here is not how to set the locator, but how to set the cursor.
That is why I never click up there.
back when we didn’t have the ability to set the cursor freely, I added one or two ruler tracks, below the ruler.
The ‘lame’ thing about this ruler area is that you have an upper and a lower zone in this very tiny area. The upper controlling the ‘loop’ on/off and the lower the ruler position. Users complained about this so Steinberg came up with a solution…“you can now disable the upper part in preferences so the ruler will only function to select position”. Yeahhhh yippee! But wait…The ruler is still divided into two parts and if I click into the upper part I still see the ‘hand tool’ but it doesn’t activate the loop anymore. Actually it just shows the hand tool but doesn’t do anything!
So I still have the annoyance of clicking on this bar and sometimes not doing what I want. I just want it to go to the selected bar, but if I click to high it only shows the hand tool but doesn’t do anything!
So a runner up for the ‘lamest’ fix of the year!
If you’re going to offer to disable some feature in the preferences, make sure it’s not just disabled and still there. Make sure this area is gone and the ruler area is completely available to select the song position.
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Thanks for all the input, guys. So, it’s not just me. The ruler needs a lot of work. It sounds like the very small height of the ruler is a throwback to the days when computer monitor real estate was very valuable and could justify a smaller ruler height. Today, everyone uses 24 inch or larger monitors for serious production. Heck, our drummer uses a second-hand 55" Samsung hung on the wall four feet away from his desk. I’m envious!
Why does it take so long for companies to make a simple fix?? I know sometimes it’s not easy because while the fix can be done with a few code changes, they need to make sure the overall program is unaffected, which can take time and testing. As for the ruler, it sounds like it’s been an issue for several years. Steinberg, are you listening??
I took Peakae’s advice and added a Ruler track. At least the full height of the Ruler track is dedicated to placing the cursor! No stupid hand or pencil in the way. It would be nice if the Ruler track was sizable for height, even just a bit.
still not sizeable height in cubase 12 for the ruler track
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Another work-around is to hold shift and click in an empty space in the project window.
Oh man, I would pay extra for a resizable ruler! It’s so painful to locate with such tiny area (even just half of the ruler).
All the workarounds suck at some point:
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Option “Locate when clicked in empty space”
This is almost good, but there are cases when there is just no space in your view and you need to fallback to the ruler anyway. Also I find myself accidentally crippling e.g. some automation track thinking it’s an “empty space” -
Having more ruler tracks
This is really useful only when putting those tracks in a divided track list, so it stays pinned at the top. But divided track list sucks at some workflows, like when I need to copy some audio part within a track, I copy an event, locate using extra rules, then paste but it pastes it to the upper track list
Pretty please Steinberg:
Solution 1 (good): Option to disable the hand/draw tool in the ruler. At least we get the upper part of the ruler for locating.
Solution 2 (ULTIMATE): Make the ruler resizable in height 
(I have cubase pro 12)
Have they fixed this in Cubase 13? I’m about to jump from 10.5 to 13.
Probably not, no mention of it in the changelog
It so sad they won’t fix a simple thing. Maybe there’s more to it than I realize. All the same, it’s a basic function that should have been there since Day 1.