Can't Delete/Move "VST Instrument" nor "MIDI Instrument"

Dear Dorico community

I can’t seem to be able to delete a “MIDI Instrument” (nor similary, a “VST Instrument”), unless it is the lowest in the stack. In the below screenshot, the trash icon is “greyed out” (no actual instrument is yet assigned to this MIDI Instrument in this test).

Why wouldn’t it be possible to delete a VST/MIDI Instrument when it is in the middle of the stack?

Instruments

Does deleting arbitrary VST/MIDI Instruments work properly in your Dorico setup? Or is also only the lowest one in the stack deletable?

Thanks for your feedback and with kind regards

You can set it to “---------------” (i.e. empty), but you can’t delete it.

I suppose that having all the following VSTs decrement by 1 index number might cause a lot of chaos in instrument assignments.

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Thank you @benwiggy for your response, that’s a very interesting thought! (And thanks for confirming that deleting VST/MIDI Instruments is not currently possible, unless it’s the last in the stack)

I do hope it’s not that though. Imagine not being able to insert/move/delete tracks in Cubase, just because that would mess up the internal routing? :face_with_monocle:

I do hope routing/assignment in Dorico is not based on a user-facing/surfaced order of the VST/MIDI Instruments in the UI?

On a side note: it seems also not possible to re-order the VST/MIDI Instruments (which is consistent with your suspicion though!)

All the best

After moving my instruments to VEPro from Dorico, I found this thread while searching for a way to delete all of these superfluous vst inserts. You can’t delete them? What a mess.

You can’t delete entries in the middle of the rack, but you can empty them, which will unload the plug-ins, releasing their resources. (It would be good to allow the deletion of entries in the middle of the rack, but it’s a bit more complicated than it might seem, due to the way the IDs maintained by Dorico have to be mapped onto the IDs maintained by the audio engine.)