Manage Tracks in Cubase with Project Logical Editor

When working in any project it’s very easy for the project to get bogged down with loads of unwanted tracks and regions. One way to sort this out is to explore the Cubase Project Logical Editor (PLE), and use its functions to help improve your workflow and neaten up your project. Let’s take a look at how to use this feature and how it can help ease your workflow. 

Where to find the PLE

The Project Logical Editor can be found under the Edit menu. You’ll also see there is a Process Project Logical Editor option. This applies the preset you choose to your selects tracks or parts. So in the PLE you can choose, edit and create your own presets, and then you can use this process function to apply them. Let’s take a look at some of these presets and how they can assist you.  

PLE Presets

If you go to the process Project Logical Editor submenu, there are some very handy presets here that you can use to neaten up your project and improve your workflow. These presets are broken up into different submenus:

• Examples
• Naming
• Parts + Events
• Tracks
• Visibility

So depending on what you want to process, be it a track or an event, then you skip to this category. I’d like to go over a few really handy ones that can really help sort out your projects.

Maintenance Presets

I’ll call these presets maintenance presets, as they are good housekeepers of your projects. Let’s first take a look at the Naming category. Now if you have an assortment of different track names and you’d just like to reorganize them, you can select the tracks and then choose the Rename and Renumber. This will give the tracks their initial default name and a number to them. Now you can go through and rename the tracks accordingly.

Removing Unwanted Tracks and Parts 

Now the Parts + Events section has some extra handy presets. If you’ve got a big project with numerous empty or muted parts that you don’t need any more you can neaten up the project by deleting any muted events. Then to take it a step further, under the Tracks category you can also remove any muted or empty tracks. So imagine you’ve got 200 tracks in your projects and about 20 unused. Instead of having to go to each one and choosing to remove it, you can just run this process. 

Or another option: let’s say you’ve rendered all your MIDI tracks to audio, you can then just simply remove all the MIDI tracks in one go.

Using the Editor

If you want to take these presets a bit further you can create your own processes in the Project Logical Editor. Open up one of the presets and you see the conditions that have been setup to perform the functions.

You may need to get your head around some Boolean operations -  those AND, IF, OR scenarios to build up your presets. But you can build up your own unique set of presets that you can use to help your own personal workflow.

So the top part you set the trigger and the conditions, and then in the lower part you set the action that is applied to the target. Then you can apply it and see if it works. If all goes well remember to save your own preset so you can recall it later.

Conclusion

So that’s how to take advantage of the PLE and use it to neaten up and improve the workflow on your Cubase Projects. Either use the bundled presets or build up your own. I hope this article helped de-mystify this editor and how it can be used.