Add Volume & Pan to Track Controls Setting

Add Volume and Pan to Track Controls Setting would minimize the need for leave the inspector open giving us more room for the Project Window. 90% of the time, I open the inspector or mixer just to change a few decibels or do a little pan adjustment. It would be awesome to have that in the Track Controls Settings.

It is surprising that it’s not there already.

2 Likes

+1

Interesting thought. It could just be two little rectangles with the values written, and you can drag on them to change it.

Exactly. I’d rather have a little wider track controls than both track controls + the inspector witch is full of distracting, cluttered and often doubled information anyway. It’s just a cleaner layout without the inspector in my opinion.

I like the fact that looking at the highlighted track (selected track), I can see if it is rec enabled, soloed, muted, frozen etc… For me, all of that info makes sens to have on the track controls. All that we are missing is volume and pan. Having to select a track and then look at the inspector to see that info is just 2 additional steps we could avoid a 1000 times a day.

I bet a lot of people would appreciate. I love Cubase a lot but coming from Ableton Live (and yes I scored to picture and worked with the arrangement view), I still miss the way everything was neat and clear. No eye candy but very intuitive and easy to work with.

You can just keep the mixer open for level adjustments, no need for the Inspector then either.

The idea is to have less things open and that includes the mixer especially for people working on laptops. I work with 4 monitors so I do always have the mixer open on a different screen but when I work on more than 32 tracks so that means pretty much all my projects, I have first, switch my focus on another screen, then scroll though the mixer if the selected track is not in the shot already to find it.

The project window on the other hand will always be positioned at where I’m currently working so to have a volume and pan reference on each track would be very helpful at not changing my focus on another window, zone or mixer.

To be clear, I’m not talking about mixing on the project window. I’m talking about on the spot quick adjustments when something obvious like an Omnisphere patch is 10db too loud for exemple or I just doubled a track and want to hard pan them. Saving seconds but mostly focus is what it’s all about.

So for now, leaving the inspector open is the fastest way to do that. Having the volume and pan controls on the track controls, I could leave it close 90% of the time and save some valuable project window space.

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This is a no-brainer. Having the actual volume data on the audio track settings should be there 100%. When you’re making 20 - 30 adjustments on a project a minute, having to switch your attention to the mixer window (or open it on a laptop), or using the inspector when you just want a quick view (or quick grab and move) of the volume level is a waste of time.

Here’s how I have my track settings at the moment:

Ideally, it would look kind of like this:

Photoshopped volume data onto Audio Channel and Instrument Channel, and labeled / colored each track type so you can see a potential setup. With that new setup there would be a split second glimpse of the volume levels of all the tracks (with the option to the adjust it right there), while not having to go the mixer, go deal with the mess that is the inspector. The great thing about this - even if you use the inspector - is that you can adjust the volume from the timeline, without having to first select the track you want to adjust. Just like groups / fx, just grab the volume data and move it. :smiley:

Pan would be very cool too - but that seems like it would have to be added to all channels, as it’s not an option on groups / fx either.

1 Like

+1

For a sec I thought I found a way over Track Quick Controls - but this only shown i a rack in mixer or Inspector - and does not make sense for volume duplicate fader in mixer.
Would be useful to also allow quickcontrols in track controls settings. this way you could assign many other things to be on track panel.
Reaper do it this way - showing own controls like that.

Yes! That is exactly what we need! Good job on illustrating with photoshop how seemingless this addition would be!

1 Like

It looks exactly right.

+1

+1

+1

Yes please +1! If this was implimented many of us would NEVER have to open up the channel settings window every again because then we could just use the inspector for adding/removing plugins! (If only that inspector width could be manually adjusted and made wider so we can read the plugin names). Right now I keep having to scroll down in the inspector to reach the fader, but if the volume controls were in the tracks themselves I would never need to keep scroller down and up ever again! The group tracks have the ability to adjust the volume by adding “parameter” to the track settings; if only that could be added for all tracks!

+10000001!!

Hello.
This is the very reason I’ve never started to use Cubase. The user interface is just awful.
I’m a fellow Cakewalk user for the last 20 years and yes, they’ve made the GUI right. I practically never leave the Project window. Take a look here:


And have I mentioned that Cakewalk is now completely free?
Cheers!

1 Like

+1 for this. 5 years later and you still can’t tell if two channels are panned differently in the Project window (without opening mixer). Cakewalk and Reaper have us beat here.

Only 3 votes for the FR so far.

we can dream