Can No Longer Record MIDI in Cubase 13 Pro (windows 11)

[guy500]

A few days ago, I downloaded Cubase Pro 13 to try/learn, so I'm very new to all this.

At first, it seemed to work fine (even though I could do almost nothing on it yet), and I was trying to follow tutorials to learn it, but found that whenever I had Cubase open, I couldn't get any sound out of Youtube. ChatGPT "helpfully" advised me to go into my PC sound settings and prevent applications from taking exclusive control of my sound. That's when the problem started - I couldn't get any sound at all out of Cubase after that, though other PC sound was fine and the indicators within these programs showed that there was a signal being generated. Switching the PC sound settings back to where they were didn't work, even after several restarts.

Someone on a forum advised me to download and install ASIO4ALL drivers and try that. That helped a little. I switched the Cubase settings to this new driver, and now I can get sound out of Cubase (though I often need to fiddle around a lot in audio settings to get even that), but I still can’t record anything. It look like it's recording and it does show a signal, but when I stop the recording, there's nothing there.

And if I switch back to the General Low Latency drivers there is again no sound at all.

I’ve been playing around in the audio connections (which I don't really understand) trying to make it work, I see that it's impossible to get the same channels set for the Outputs and the Control Room, whichever driver I'm trying to set up. My soundcard is called "Live! 24 Bit External", but if I set the Outputs to "Live! 24 Bit External 1" and "Live! 24 Bit External 2", then the Control Room L/R are automatically set to 3/4, which doesn't seem to correspond to anything.

Can anyone please help me to get Cubase up and running so i can learn it???

[mountainmaster]

That is just how Cubase works under Windows 11. I have learned to live with it.

If you let applications take exclusive control then Cubase takes over and other apps have no sound.
If you disable that setting then Cubase has no sound, unless no other app was using the sound output at the moment you opened Cubase.

If you have multiple sound output devices you can do as I do: Before starting Cubase I switch Windows sound from my digital speaker output to my headphone output. So now Cubase can use the speaker exclusively while I can still listen to other apps through my headphone.

[swilow11]

When you saying "recording" are you talking about recording midi or audio? If it's audio, are you seeing a recorded waveform that you cannot hear? Or are recorded tracks just blank? If it's midi not being recorded, the issue probably isn't your audio i/o but is more likely your controller setup

Cubase is annoying as a DAW because it's default setup will never yield any sound whatsoever until you select your outputs. It's obvious once you know this, and there is good reason for it, but it makes the learning curve spiral exponentially in the first moments you open the DAW. It's just not beginner friendly.

I would actually suggest that if you're new to this, Cubase Pro has features that are just going to confuse you. The control room feature, while its great, IS confusing at first because you basically have what feels like 2 master tracks. I would actually advise going to Cubase Artist- I basically never noticed any major differences in the two versions besides the loss of the control room (and I would actually think one could emulate that via routing) and the more substantive direct offline processing (admittedly a big difference) which was always hit and miss for me anyway.

Anyway, Cubase is fantastic and has the best built in devices of any DAW ive used. I love the channel strip and sorely miss it as I've switched almost entirely to Bitwig which I find more efficient and with a much better layout. I still use Cubase sometimes for big sample library projects but will most likely just sell my license eventually.

[tapper mike]

Also don't forget to activate your tracks.

I have a love hate affair with Cubase. I love to hate it. At any given time it simply doesn't work. It loses the dir folder for storage. If I choose another one then it's hell to get back to the correct dir structure for my other project. Mixcraft does this way better. It mostly works out of the box but sometimes they both have little freakouts loading plugins on start up. It doesn't help that I have five drives HDD and SSD.

Still when it works it's great. Sadly I run out of patience trying to learn the in's and outs of building templates. Because omce I get it loaded and running all I want to do is run through my plugins.

[Valkasman]

I'm not sure if it's a bug but I've been having problems with quantization in Cubase 13. In the sequencer view and on the actual clip I can never get the midi to quantize right. if I adjust one the other changes. Weird.