The wrong Track colour in ARA bug revisited - and a workaround

Cubase
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Since Cubase 15 the Track or Event colours are not reported correctly to ARA extension SpectraLayers, meaning there’s no way to discriminate between Layers for editing.

It is a bug that maybe doesn’t appear on all systems. It does however on my Apple Studio Max M1 under Sequoia and on fellow forumist @Elderman’s 12th gen Intel i9 under Windows 11 Pro.

How to repro:

  1. Create a blank project in Cubase 15, use a Steinberg Template, e.g. “Stereo Mastering”.
  2. Duplicate the empty Track called “Stereo Master” that is already there. If the first Track is turquoise, make the second one red.
  3. Import any audio onto the turquoise Track.
  4. Right click the Part you just created by importing audio, select Extensions>SpectraLayers.

= In the SpectraLayers ARA window that opens the Layer colour is white, as is the spectrogram accordingly. Should be turquoise.

Undo this in Cubase 15; the SpectraLayers window will close.

  1. Import some other audio onto the other (red) Track in Cubase 15.
  2. Open Extension>SpectraLayers for both Parts that you now have, by selecting them and right click one of them to get to the Extensions>SpectraLayers menu item.

= The SpectraLayers ARA window that will open now have both Parts as white Layers with a white spectrogram representing these Layers. Should be one turquoise and one red Layer and they should be represented in the spectrogram as turquoise and red.

Since they are both white it’s impossible to discriminate between them when editing in SpectraLayers, making SpectraLayers useless in this respect.

So it seems Cubase 15 isn’t reporting the colors correctly to SpectraLayers.

Elderman has pinned down the bug to being related to the Track type default colour in Cubase 15 and he has come up with a nice workaround.

The workaround would be to go to Settings>User Interface>Track Type Default Colors>Audio and change the bottommost slider to a value <26 , possibly only ”0” will work on his system. On my system 0-25 will work but 26 and upwards will invoke the bug leading to white Layers in SpectraLayers.

I hope the Cubase dev team will fix this, the sooner the better.

See Elderman’s elegant presentation of his workarounds here: