When working on a large project I often have to rapidly alter automation on lanes that are very far apart in the project e.g track 2 and track 49.
I know I can use track visibility to hide tracks I’m not working on but towards the end of a project I need lots of tracks /automation lanes open. Scrolling up and down trying to find the right track is headache inducing and terrible for my ailing eye sight.
Colouring tracks can help a bit, but it only goes so far, a 60 track project can’t have 60 distinguishable colours after all.
The solution would be to have something similar to markers, so a panel on the left of the arrangement page (similar to the track visibility panel) could contain a custom list of automation lanes (drag and drop). I could then select a lane from this list or use a hotkey to cycle through the list. No more starring at tracks flying past my eye ever again! It would just jump to the right place. Not only would this be more ergonomic it would probably save 30 mins a day where I scroll back and forth hunting for the track I want.
I made this very suggestion about a month ago. I also called it Vertical Markers. Bookmarks is nice as well.
It’s self-evident. My projects often have hundreds of tracks. And I spend more time screwing around -vertically-. There need to be the same navigation tools for going up and down as there are for going side to side.
You can essentially accomplish what you’re after with some basic PLE Script/Macros and basic project organization, for example, If I want to see all the Drums in the project, I have a PLE script with an assigned key command. And then if I want to switch to only Strings, I can hit that key command as well.
All my drum tracks have Drm in the title and are all in a Drm folder, so that I can target that always. Vocals always have ‘Voc’, Guitars always have ‘Gtr’, Dialogue is ‘Dx’, Sound Effects ‘SFX’, etc.
I can flip between all of these quickly (as well as some specific variations like Drums and Bass) with key commands.
I’ve also done this for Solo/Muting to quick solo vocals, or mute drums, etc, etc.
Cubase/PLE is amazing.
edit
It may be actually, that you should request some additions/new features to PLE, and or Key Command Functions such as ‘Scroll To Selected Track’. This way with PLE you could target select ‘Voc-Ld’ and ‘Scroll to Selected Track’.
it allows you to create automated processes using Boolean Logic, to almost any function in Cubase and create new ones for yourself.
You can use Macros in your PLE scripts.
So you can use PLE to ‘Select’ all tracks that contain ‘Drm’, and then run a macro, or set the track colour. All in the stroke of one mouse click or key command.
You can target tracks, events, parts, markers, etc, etc by their name, colour, length, and do different processes on them.
Oh you mean project logical editor, I see what you mean I can hide tracks that are not a given string. I have saved this as a preset but it doesn’t show in the key commands list?
I have it working now and this may help for now but it is a bit basic, i.e I can only really setup some very generic presets, it wont work for tracks that are not so easily categorised.
Okay the way I have this set up, requires a certain consistent organizational workflow which is nice to get into anyways.
A prerequisite is having a template system where you are always using templates with folders that are named a certain way so that they can always be targeted. So I have instrumentation types organized into folders, and they are always named the same thing because I am always using the same base template which I have variations of.
Lets use Drums as an example:
There are different ways of doing this depending on if you want,
-Toggle Show
-Hide
-Show only
I don’t solely use the PLE hide-enable/disable/toggle function, I’m also using a macro.
PLE #1 “Show Only D R U M S”
Name | Equal | D R U M S
Track Operation | Hide Track | Disable
Function: Transform | Macro: Visibility+Select D R U M S
Macro#1
the macro listed above, also contains another PLE… This is the macro:
-Process Project Logical Editor - Select ‘D R U M S’ ((> <---- this will be PLE#2 below> ))
-Channel & Track Visibility - Agents: Show Only Selected Channels/Tracks
-Project - Folding: Unfold Tracks
-Zoom - Zoom Tracks Full
This is what I do and it works really great and it doesn’t keep you from using Colors in any other way. It doesn’t actually use the color itself, but rather the name of the color. So you can have 5 colors in your pallet that are all the exact same shade of orange but with different names. At the heart of it you are using the Color Name as a constant which you can assign to a Track. I wrote in some detail about this here.
Still the vertical markers idea would be pretty useful.