Being a Cubase user since version 5 I’m truly fond of this DAW as - at least to my personal taste - the UI look and feel is the most “natural” one to me. For a longer period I have been working with Cubase 12 now - even though I bought the Cubase 13 and Cubase 14 updates along the way. I did not consider switching to the most recent versions as I was in the middle of several projects while working with Cubase 12. I better had done this… and here is why.
Cubase 12 Sample Editor
One important feature to my workflow is being able to quickly view and edit pitch and warp changes made in the sample editor. In Cubase 12 this was easily possible in the sample editor by using the mousewheel on the sample selection combobox. The following screen capture shows the behavior:
The advantage of this is that your eyes can stay focused on the events while changing the active sample.
Cubase 13/14 Sample Editor
In Cubase 13 (tested with 13.0.55) and Cubase 14 (tried with 14.0.30-14.0.32) this is no longer possible as you now have to click on that active sample combobox and select the next sample of interest. This is flawed in two ways because:
a) you need two clicks to change the active sample and b) the eyes no longer stay focused on the sample editor events.
See the following screen capture of the same project location under Cubase 14:
This is cumbersome and truly makes fast warp and pitch editing impossible.
Please note that the “Mouse Wheel Mode” setting under Preferences → Controls has no influence on this behavior. Changing the quantize presets or grid types is still possible to change using the mousewheel though whereas other comboboxes are not affected by it. This seems rather inconsistent to me.
For my personal experience I was always fine with the mousewheel behavior back then. Preventing changes to mix parameters could be prevented by using the lock on these parameters. But checking the Steinberg forum it seems that this is a truly sensitive issue for other Cubase users. So I’m of course okay with being able to fully disable this.
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I have reported this issue under the support ticket #705926 which I’ve reported at 2025-05-14 and was informed by Steinberg support that:
Unfortunately, it is a bug in the latest maintenance update of Cubase 14. Our developers are aware of it and will fix it within one of the next updates.
Are they? Because 14.0.31 and 14.0.32 are not fixing this issue. Furthermore, support has gone silent after contacting Steinberg support on 2025-10-06 (after 14.0.31 was out).
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Fun Fact: I’ve reported the exact same issue in 2021 when I bought the Cubase 10.5 update. This was filed under the support ticket #375541. Here I had actually expected - after this was fixed for Cubase 11 - that this behavior would not degrade anymore.
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For now Steinberg support has gone silent to me after I’ve reported that issue over two months ago and no fix is in sight. This is truly disappointing. At the current state I won’t employ Cubase 14 for production use… at least not as long as such rudimentary features like the quick sample switching are broken.