You’ll also see that rotating the dial seems like it can also act as a mouse “clicker”, as demonstrated in the Listen “LE” on/off action, but it almost seems a little fiddly with that, but maybe that’s just me, I haven’t tried that much. There is no mouse clicking involved at all. In the attached vid, I start out by bringing up the control panel just for viewing purposes, then I make some changes in a Cubase project made by rotating the Surface Dial. I’m using it with a Kensington track ball whose scroller ring is awkward and even a little painful to spin, with Cubase 11.0.30 in W10 on an old and borderline underpowered computer. If it fritzes out in use later I’ll post back, but as of now it’s ease of use and functionality is almost mind blowing. The Surface Dial rotation is very smooth and solid-feeling, it seems to be manufactured very well. No clicking involved, no mapping involved, it’s as simple as that. Just simply point the arrow at a dial, or fader, or slider (horizontal or vertical), or alphanumeric entry ( (like in the info line, “Start”, “Value” or in the Transport Panel like punch in/out values, etc.) - rotating the Surface Dial then very smoothly changes the value. More testing with Elephant and the Microsoft Dial today, including letting it be idle for a full half hour between editing in Cubase.Īs far as I can tell, it works great! This post is a full-throated endorsement to date of using this as a controller in Cubase, as below: Just when I feel it is a better way of doing things. I also use it while browsing the web, or in other programs. Much less tension in your right hand, which is a thing for me…

Imagine hovering the mouse over a knob, then change the value very precise with the dial, then navigate to the next fader or knob, and so on. I wrote two autohotkey scripts that make it work as a mousewheel or mouse “mover”, this is the perfect solution for me.Īnd yes, it IS a two hand solution indeed. I ended up with a few second hand good old “griffin powermate USB” knobs. I had two Surface dials for testing, sold them both. It works on anything.īUT!!!: It goes to sleep after a few minutes (buld in bluetetooth energy saver). It is fitted on an audio interface.Įnter the discussed solution. The Steinberg A1 knob is a great solution with a few cavets: 1: It does not work with vst2 (and some vst3) plugins. I tried varous controllers, but the problem wit these is they are to specific (examples: ony faders and some butons but not all, having to touch to many comands before being able to control a parameter, and so on.) I find one hand mouse operation cumbersome especialy when you need to do precise adjustments in audiosoftware.

Griffin powermate windows 10 software