I am new to 8.5 Pro and was experimenting with adding VST instruments. After a few false starts I figured out that if I click the “Add Track Instrument” at the top left of the VST Instruments / Media Bay panel, then I get VST instruments with tracks and sounds when I play my external keyboard, which is great.
But what is not great is that before I discovered that button, I added some VST instruments that didn’t make any sounds and didn’t have any associated tracks. I tried getting rid of them by selecting “No VST instrument”, but now I have 5 lines of useless “No VST Instrument” entries at the top of my VST Instruments list that I cannot seem to get rid of in any way. They are taking up several square inches of valuable screen real estate and they are annoying.
I searched the forums and can’t find a way to either re-order them to the bottom of the list or (what I really want) to just delete them. It seems extraordinary to me that any modern piece of software would be written in a way so that it is possible to accidentally add something to the UI which is then impossible to remove, but it’s beginning to look like this may be the case here.
Yeah. You just have to remove the track that was associated with the instrument from the arrange page and the “no vst instrument” will go away. In the future, instead of setting the instrument in the rack to “no VST,” select the instrument track in your arrange page and choose “remove selected tracks.”
Thank you for the reply! I now realize that my problem was that I had created a lot of tracks and instruments to experiment with, and once I tried getting rid of a few of them from the instrument rack by setting them to “No VST”, I could no longer tell which tracks they belonged with.
After some further messing around I discovered that clicking the “e” in the VST instrument will bring up the instrument’s edit window AND highlight the “edit instrument” icon (NOT the “e”, which is for channel settings), in the corresponding track. Similarly, as long as both VST instrument and track are simultaneously visible I can click on the “edit instrument” icon in an arrange track and it will also highlight the “e” in the corresponding VST instrument in the rack.
It would still be great if there was some way to re-order the VST Instruments in the rack, because I like to be able to re-organize tracks as the project develops so that all the things I’m currently working on are currently visible, which means moving things out of the way while they are not being actively worked on. And per above comment, it’s MUCH easier to keep track of what belongs with what if the VST instruments can be moved around to keep them visible too…
