Hello Mothership Users, I’m coming this week with another feature suggestion that might be very useful for all motherships citizens.
As we all know The mothership has more features than a hollywood blockbuster’s CGI budget.
For those who are not familiar with vscode it’s a text editor/ide for programming. Ctrl Shift P brings up a text input command pallet where you enter the name of commands you wanna apply or even search for settings.
And since the mothership than any software on the planet. Making a command pallet for it. Would be very useful and will set it apart from any other ship. You’ll be able to do things like this just by typing the name of it and cubase will start narrowing down the matches as you type and I’m sure each one of you will have different examples.
Anything from the menus will be available: Bounce, Render, Even Quantize, Make Audio Track (for this one we can type for example make audio track as you write that for example cubase will start showing you suggestions of the inputs available and outputs and the configuration stereo mono and how many) same for instruments just right the name of the vst or any other type of track.
setup macros, or keybindings. directly from it
Bring up workspaces or mixers, undo redo… anything that cubase has to offer should be available there. Or even search for setting how many times you went to preference and you wanted to search for something but you don’t remember under which tab it is?
You just type what you want and the mothership will do it!
You can even search media bay right from it, wouldn’t that be cool.
I think this would minimize going through menus.
I’m waiting for the forum to unleash its imagination I’m sure there will be alot of cool ideas, to make this better.
We’ve never seen this before in any music software!
Something like this? A Key Commander for Cubase (Jump Bar?)
Let me know in this thread if you like, about additions you’d might want to have, so I can check whether they’re doable.
For now no, when we’re talking about instrument plugins. However, I did implement a way to add insert fx plugins, for example by typing “AddFx Stereo Delay”, and “Slot 6 Supervision”. For instrument plugins we need to use a combo of opening the addTrack window and typing, which for now can’t rely just on keyboard, we need mouse. I dislike this one, because it adds complexity where it shouldn’t at all.
That’s still really cool though! Instead of waiting on cubase to implement the things you want you’re building your own! haha! Amazing! Do you need a tester?
Awesome, take your time! and thank you for linking your thread! I wouldn’t have ever found it because I dont go to steinberg lounge. This forum has some great ideas you could build a totally new daw just from the requests haha!
Hey, your prototype looks really nice! Out of curiosity, as it is an external program, how do you get the list of possible Cubase commands, and how do you apply them? Via key commands?
What also would of course be nice is to be able to search for settings, as they can be a)hard to find and b) very hard to find. (With every new major release I hope that SB finally rewrites the old preferences window from Cubase…for far in vain.). Can’t imagine it being easy because you need to select the right value in the dialog’s tree…
In the end, it would of course be much easier if it were a native functionality in Cubase itself or failing that, we get a proper scripting engine in Cubase with access to everything and a set of widgets, not just limited to the MIDI remote…
And btw, this thread needs a whole lot ore attention and votes . If people ever experienced a command bar like in VS code, they’d be all over it. No more searching through menus, no more searching through all the different places in Cubase where things can be configured. Just immediate, fast access to everything as long as you vaguely know what to search for.
One could also imagine it being (optionally) extended with LLM and natural language commands, like eg “give all audio tracks with ‘guitar’ in the name the color yellow”, all the things that you probably can do now with the logical editor, but have to find out how first…
Hi,
The list is parsed from the Cubase xml file. I then create a map which is used for searching, and at the same time, this map is converted to a javascript object we can read from inside a MIDI Remote. The trick here is that when the remote is loading, it binds every single command that exists to a fake cc. The external app uses sysex to pass the unique ID of the command to the remote, where we translate it to a cc bound to the command.
While surely doable, I would hesitate to do so, since I’ve seen one too many times complaints about corrupted preferences file. I wouldn’t want to take the blame for such cases
Totally agree, obviously. I’d love to have complete control.
With the advancements in A.I. I’m almost sure this will eventually get delivered. Since for e.g. clients like ChatGPT can suggest PLEs, I see no reason for Steinberg to not provide this kind of functionality, which will be even more accurate since coming from the inside.
It required them to implement every feature of the application as a command so the command prompt, menu items and toolbars, and scripts all call (approximately) the same code.
It’s a pretty significant amount of work to do something like this, though, and I wonder how many musicians would like this (or the VSCode-like version) vs the existing UI.
That is one clever hack! I didn’t know that you could have so many CCs in Midi, but then I am no expert there… What do you use as the manufacturer id for sysex?
So the general workflow for this is, you have an external program which provides the cmdline, this should probably get called by a global hotkey, you need your special midi remote in cubase, when you call a cmd, this gets send to the midi remote which executes it. Do you have to then switch back to Cubase manually, or can the app find the Cubase window and bring it back to front?
Out of (further) curiosity, what do you develop you cmdline app in?
I’d offer my help, but you have the programming side covered of course, and I doubt that I could be of any help there anyway… Would like to try it if you have a beta version of something.
Well, you can’t, sorry for the confusion here. By cc, I meant custom controls, not the ordinary MIDI CCs. In the MIDI Remote we can have thousands of these: var aCustomControl=deviceDriver.mSurface.makeCustomValueVariable("aName")
Nope. Since the triggers come from the MIDI Remote, Cubendo can be in the background. Not sure though if there are specific commands that need it to be in front. Anyway, my app has an “Always on Top” checkBox so it can stay somewhere near Cubase without issues, as far as I’ve seen. Still, you can always have it hidden and restored with a user defined shortcut, correct.
For the past 15 years, I’ve been using B4J for such apps. It’s pretty rapid to develop with, and since it generates java apps in reality, it’s relatively easy to deploy for Win, Mac and Linux
The thing is that I will not be too much into actively building upon this app, so my plan is to create a wiki thread with the app packages, and at the same time, the source code for friends like you who have the knowledge to build upon and turn it to a more useful tool
Never heard of it, interesting, will keep it in mind… developing mostly on Linux and/or some web apps, I’ve never ventured into cross platform GUI programming, but anything that makes it easy is good.
Ha, fully understand, writing software is great until you let the users get their hands on it .
. If people ever experienced a command bar like in VS code, they’d be all over it. No more searching through menus, no more searching through all the different places in Cubase where things can be configured. Just immediate, fast access to everything as long as you vaguely know what to search for.
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