Desperately need the color tool back

Hi, have you tried to use the colorize panel as a floating window? If you press shift+alt+c the panel will open and stay open as long as you need it. It’s not the same workflow as you described, but it will do the job, don’t you think?

It doesn’t I’ve tried. It’s a small difference big difference kind of thing, in the way that the time adds up. It’s quicker to use alt-modifier to sample colours you have already used which cues the colour and keeps it as the selected colour you then keep using.

There is no colour cue with the new panel. you have to keep re selecting the colour, and then you are also selecting events. With colour tool, you can sample a colour, range select events with the cursor, and change the colour all in one brief stroke all just using the colour tool.

It’s all about the alt modifier colour sampling for me.

I’ve given better descriptions in the links above.


Also need the colour titles back. Expanded view with colour titles, and condensed view with no titles.

Could I also suggest colour preview? so if you hold your mouse over a colour, whatever it is you have selected (track or event) would preview that colour, and then you click to confirm.

Helpful suggestion Matthias…thank you. DIdn’t know you could float the color window. But as RMind pointed out… you’re only removing one click that way. You’ve still got to click the part & then mouse over to the floating color window. That’s a lot of unnecessary back & forth, as opposed to having a color pre-selected & then just clicking the parts you want colored as you hear them. It’s a dealbreaker for me.

But where Steinberg blew it on this is totally removing the color name/labels from the pallet (and no hovering to see the name over the color is not even vaguely as useful).

When I choose a color for a track, 99.999% of the time it is based exclusively on the text label. I’m looking for the label that reads “cello” or “viola” to find the right color. With the new pallet I’m looking at 8 slightly different shades of turquoise trying to determine which one is for “cello” and which aren’t.

Good news: You can keep the color pallet open as long as needed.
Bad news: It is now much, much more difficult to find the color you want to use.

I would also suggest adding some double click on colour logic.

First and foremost, if I have an audio event selected, and the channel selected… selecting a colour only changes the event which makes sense because people might want to keep the colour of the channel the same and colour events differently. But sometimes, I DO, want to change the colour of both the event and the channel.

Counting the clicks to do this… (1) Click audio event (2) click/key colour palette (3) select colour (4) deselect audio event (5) select track if its not selected (6) select same colour.

(4) and (6) can be eliminated if you added a double click function where it colours both the selected event, and changes the channel colour.

People never get enough, the new color tools are much better than before. Just get use to it.

Wtf are you going off on buddy :confused:

no actually they are not, we have systematically proved that. Maybe for people that just randomly pick colours as I do myself sometimes, yes. But some people have developed a method to how they use colour tool and some such as myself, figured out ways to exploit it to its fullest efficient potential - and those ways are gone now, and nothing in the new way can replicate.

How are ADDED mouse clicks, better than before? How is the inability to see the colour labels/titles for quick selection of the right colour… better than before?

Please explain :laughing: :unamused:

I love the new color tool. It’s more like logic x so I got used to it. What’s wrong with the new color tool?

Just make a shortcut, I have option-c so the palette opens right up.

Did you read the thread,

or read either of these

Yes, we’re being particular twats, but we’re particular twats with particular jobs.

Yeah… What Resonant said.

I mean, obviously all this stuff is subjective. But…subjectively, no way is it better. Simpler… maybe. But for me it’s stripped back. And not in a good way. In a ‘features are now missing’ way.
And it’s not helpful or realistic to say ‘get used to it’. The fact is, mine, and clearly others workflow is drastically affected because of these changes.
I now simply can not comp in the efficient and effective manner to which Cubase had me accustomed to doing so for years now.
Believe me, I tried it in 10. I don’t like the idea of flicking back & forth between 8.5 & 10 when I want to comp. But trying to color the vocal parts the way I’m used to was so frustrating I nearly threw my mouse against the wall.
It’s always curious to me when a company backtracks on great features that they clearly thought were cool when they decided to implement them (& were right). I genuinely wonder why they make those decisions to undo that good work. Is it just that they’re busy making the software & not using it? Or not aware of how their customers use it perhaps? Or just that they need for things to ‘change’ because it’s a new revision?

a functioning tool with a clear workflow has been REMOVED! the point is WHY remove it arbitrarily? yes, there are probably a dozen other ways to facilitate coloring events etc. But the functionality was there fully integrated in a well working manner. and then someone decides to remove it!
a similar change would be to decide to have rotary knobs instead of faders in the mixer. it would still work and looking at old consoles that how it used to be. some people might even prefer that scenario. but WHY would that be done? it just would change the workflow for no reason.
well… just get used to it…!

this is so unbelievably CRAZY!

Title is accurate, desperately need this back. The work I was in the middle of doing (snare sample creation, using outboard processing), is probably the best test for whether or not this new colour protocol would work and doesn’t. I would go back to 9.5 to finish this work, but I’m using the opportunity to learn Cubase. It has definitely slowed down my workflow.

Hoping to see it’s return in the next update…

I don’t think you’d risk too much "learning’ if you used 9.5 for just coloring tasks. Typically there is no problem opening a Project back-and-forth between different versions of Cubase.

Hi Matthias, can I respectfully ask what is the background of these kinds of decisions Steinberg is taking?
Why remove things that were crucial to people’s workflows, Like this one, or the new right click contextual menu, which I think is a good move, but it seems that you have removed lots of options that are contextually valid.

My point is, why the stubbornness of forcing users to work your way, and hinder their proven workflow, which saves them time and put food on their table?

The attached image shows the 9.5 & 10 color selection GUIs side by side.

If I had recordings of an oud and a minimoog solo that I wanted to color code, which GUI would you rather use to accomplish the task? One makes it pretty easy while the other makes the task very difficult bordering on impossible.

So no it will not do the job.

you have a very interesting and very specific way to use colors. i can see why the new color kills your workflow.
it speaks to my general complaint regarding Steinberg updates: they fiddle all the time with the visuals and change things that are not broken. and sometimes break things on top of it. focus on the essentials and functionality!

Matthias, would appreciate some comment on whether or not this has been passed on to devs and if it’s being reconsidered, Danke

I can see how it affects your particular workflow. One solution that would suit your workflow (that would take some time to set up) would be to create a set of logical editor functions and assign it to a macro key. So in your session, lets say you have 50 different instruments loaded and named that need colouring. You could literally click 1 key and Cubase will automatically assign the correct colour for each instrument based on the name of each channel. That way you’d never need to open the colour pallet again, or even look at the names.

Yup, that is what it has come to. It is the Project Logical Editor by the way, not the regular one. Attached is a PLE Preset example of how set a Track to a specific color. In the bottom Parameter 1 should show you a list of your colors. This is a bit different than the Color Tool/Picker in that it doesn’t matter if any Parts are selected - it just colors the currently selected Track(s) and any Parts on them.

You need to make one of these for each color, which can get tedious. But once that’s done, as Marcus points out, they can be assigned to Key Commands. Or used in other interesting ways… (drum roll, coming soon)