I agree with the OP here, it’s the inconsistency and half-finished vibe that bothers me. That, more than anything else is what makes cubase look so busy and cluttered.
Having differentials sometimes makes things seem less cluttered as it allows your eyes to… well… differentiate and not be distracted or pulled.
No offense, and you’re not the only one that has posted a picture with drawings, but I keep expecting some sort of profound criticism I would agree with… I have lots of criticisms… But I’m not seeing the issue here, like it’s some strange OCD I don’t have and am glad lol. I’ve been using since SX3… almost everyday since SX3… the difference between the inspector record/monitor button and the track record/monitor - has never in the slightest came into my conscious thought.
As we get closer to C11 release, I’m optimistic that Steinberg has been busy during quarantine/lockdown!
Also, the people have spoken:
Please.
Waveform anti-aliasing.
Professional metering and visuals (faster fallback speed/more than 40db/s, Pro Tools speed, non gradient).
Moving tracks in mixer.
Warping on arrangement window/tracks.
Better fonts/colors.
Ability to turn on and off grid lines in arrangement window.
Multi-track free warp
Nudging of events and midi notes by specific musical or time values by key command and nudge tools (without the use of logical editor and independent of quantize grid).
Proper EUCON support (reflect hidden tracks on surfaces, Avid Dock automation buttons reflect Cubase state, etc.)
Gapless audio engine
Folder group tracks (folder tracks fold/reflect in mixer)
Range selection edit on event gain/envelopes (PT style clip gain)
Stereo plugins on mono tracks.
Pro Tools Beat Detective type solution (Cubase can already do hitpoints and then slice events. Then one can quantize those slices or events. However doing a crossfade or close gaps without time stretch is unreliable. We need a Beat Detective-type conform functionality–the tools already exist in Cubase.
Range selection edit on tempo track.
Ripple Editing
Ability to show only event name or event description—not both. Or events follow track names exactly always. Also event names to be tabbed thinly so they don’t overlap waveforms (see Logic or Cubase 5?)
Tabbed VST views
Slicing in sampler track
Smooth playhead cursor and smooth scrolling on MacOS (see Logic Pro X, also a preference for blinking playhead locator like Pro Tools that works with the range tool/playhead only appears on playback and record)
Full screen windows on MacOs
.Bak Files Separate Folder
Autosave Enhancement (See UA Luna)
Rename Plugins
Rework of Macro system (scripting language, perhaps record macro moves/process live then save as preset?)
Inspector icons/workflow enhancement.
Disable Mouse Fader Movement In MixConsole
Elastic band in midi editor like Ableton
Improved markers display/visuals
Drum editor and key editor enhancement (patterns).
Triplets and swing grid in warping
Better way to import and store swing/groove Q presets.
Cubase 10 introduced a new fresh looking beautiful interface.
It needs some small improvements in terms of readability and coherence, but all in all it would be a big mistake to completely change how things are looking in general. Easiest Pro DAW to look at. Protools looks horrible and old, so does Reaper to a certain extent (even with new templates). S1 is a bit better, but still not that clear as Cubase.
I’m still on 10 and can’t wait to get on to 10.5 (or 11 if I don’t get to 10.5). Can’t wait to have flat colour events instead of gradient, the gradient events make it really hard to discern shades of colours from one another.
Two years on, I still can’t get used to having to minimize and expand all the separate windows (on PC) …and that cross-hair cursor and white track selection still suck…Maybe a “classic window behavior” option?
Yeah, you’ll probably be like me and wonder why it took so long to realize how useful and workflow enhancing workspaces are. I have mine hotkeyed with a modifier to my keypad 1-9 and you can have a hoykey to manually enter the workspace if you need more than 9… So for instance, I have my main most important workspaces 1-9… and then say, Workspace 20 will be a workspace catered to Groove Agent VSTi - I can enter that manually in the ‘Workspace X’ key command function.