New > Empty Project
VST Instruments > Add any instrument (say Spector)
Choose to “Create” MIDI track when prompted
Collapse the “VST Instruments” folder in the track list
Select the MIDI track
In the Inspector, open the Audio Fader section
Click the “e” button to open the Channel Settings window
The MIDI track gets deselected. Moreover, if you now close the Channel Setting window, it’s impossible to bring it back from the MIDI track. You have to do it in the Mixer.
Also, the Audio Fader is the only section in the Inspector for which there is no Toggle Key Command available. I think this should be fixed, too.
Thank you for the info on this Preferences setting. I mistakenly thought it was a bug but I now see the reason behind it.
However, the behavior I described (and that you quoted) can easily be reproduced if that preferences setting is ON. It won’t bother me anymore because I’ve set it to OFF, but I’m positive that if you turn it ON on your end you’ll see what I mean.
I could do a quick video of the mouse clicks involved, if needed.
Well if you have the extra time but try describing in words and maybe a screenshot, here’s what I did:
I followed your reproduction (with the setting on, as that is my default), up until the point where the midi track gets deselected and the Edit window of the VST pops up.
-Close the edit window
-Select the midi track
-The inspector is showing the audio fader section, I click the “e” button again and the same Edit window pops up.
Did I do something wrong, or might this be platform dependant?
Try reselecting the MIDI track without closing the Edit window first. This should result in the weird behavior I was referring to. The Edit window seems to go behind the Project window and can’t be brought back without resorting to the “e” button in the Mixer window (or doing some window shuffling — my point is that the “e” button in the Audio Fader section doesn’t do what it’s supposed to: open the Edit window and bring it forward…)
Ok, didn’t work at first because I have all windows that allow it set to “always on top”. So the edit window remained visible also when I selected the midi track.
BUT, the settings window switched from VST to midi editor when doing so, this made me play around a bit more.
These are really two problems, one is the track selection thing that we solved, the other one is that the edit button follows track selection (that is, the other way around) if the pref “sync project and mixer selection” is enabled.
Now there are quite a lot of combinations to plow through but in short: If you loose focus of the edit window without selecting some other track then the audio fader section should still be visible in the inspector and you can just double click the “e” to close and reopen the window.
But if you loose focus by clicking some other track, when you switch back to the midi track you either:
-click it’s “e” first to close the window in the background and then the audio fader “e” to open it properly
-triple click the “e” in the audio fader section
But, like I said, I run with both of the prefs enabled and windows “always on top” and has never been bothered by this problem.
The steps you describe are functional when the preferences setting is set to OFF, but when it’s in the ON setting, it is impossible to triple or even double click anything because — as I described in the original post — clicking on the “e” deselect the track and the Inspector becomes blank.
I’ll leave the setting OFF thanks to your suggestion and won’t be bothered by this anymore myself, but I do think that there’s room for improvement here from a user interface consistency POV.
Also, to come back to my second point, the Key Command for the Audio Fader section should really be added IMHO.
I guess you could live with that, but I’d use Always on top any time rather than turning those prefs off, it’s a great feature imo. Or is it maybe not available/necessary in the same way in OS X?
