Cubase Expression Map Editor: a limited editor for automating a few parts of creating expression maps. See instructions to get an idea of what is automated.
This is a quick and dirty tool for me, a programmer, so I'm mostly sharing it for other programmers who are capable of building it (and some options are only available by tweaking code.)
There's no binary. So open this in Visual Studio 2022 Preview (free download) or newer (or a Visual Studio 2019 Preview, but it must support .NET 6 Preview 6), Build the solution, right click ExpressionMapEditor6.WinUI, Set as Startup Project, and run.
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In Cubase: Create groups for your expression map
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In Cubase: Create articulations for your expression map, and fill in all the groups. Skip the name. (Leave name as Slot 123, etc.)
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In Cubase: Save your .expressionmap file to disk
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In Editor: Open the .expressionmap file. Heads up: autosave is enabled and will overwrite this file as you make certain changes.
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In Editor: In the header row, click the Left chevron to assign all recommended names to overwrite Slot 1, Slot 2, etc. (ignores checkboxes), or click the left chevron for each row you wish to use an auto-generated name for. (To tweak auto-generated names, edit the code.)
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In Editor: Filter the list of articulations using the header row dropdown lists. Check all articulations you wish to edit, or click the checkbox in the header row to select/deselect all. Then click a note combo, such as B-2, and click Add Note. This will add that note to all the selected visible articulations. Things are auto-saved
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In Editor: click a note if you wish to remove it. (See Known issues when deleting all notes.)
(Useful for when different expression maps are similar, but have octaves shifted.)
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In Editor: Click the Transpose tab
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In Editor: Set Transpose parameters. Example: From note C-1, transpose to C-5, and transpose 12 notes. Check the articulations you wish to transpose. Click Transpose.
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Close Editor
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In Cubase: load the .expressionmap and verify all articulations are there, (and the names and notes you added show up). If some articulations are totally missing, look at the known issues.
That's it! A lot more could be automated, and more error checks could be added, but this is the bulk of what I needed so I stopped here.
- If you remove all notes in an articulation and save, Cubase will only load part of the .expressionmap. DATA LOSS! The problem is Cubase doesn't load self-closing XML elements. So there needs to be a search and replace of
<list name="obj" type="obj" />with<list name="obj" type="obj"></list>, and then try loading again in Cubase and all the articulations should load.