For me, the main advantage of the new Instrument Tracks is the possibility to save and recall Multi Track presets of a multitimbral VST instrument.
(desribed in the new features manual page 22 under “note”)
Cubase 7.5 64 bits | Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bits | 16 GB RAM | i5 3.3 GHz processor| SSD 256 GB | Steinberg MR816x | Steinberg Midex 8 | Motu Midi Express 128 | much hardware
I see two small benefetis of track instruments vs. rack instruments:
they can be exported as track archives including all busses and sends.
they appear in the project window below the track where you added them and not in the ‘VST-instrument’ folder which is often at the end of the project or at least always in the wrong place… 
However, I severely agree that the new VST-instrument window is too big and takes up too much space on the screen.
Interesting. I could see myself using this Track Archive feature to make it easier to recall a VSTi with its channel settings. Thanks for the tip!
I see this as fair comment. I’ll see what I find difficult when I get my own copy. The autonaming does seem to be something that needs addressing.
Unless I missed it I would like to be able to route the audio outputs through the inspector on a “track instruments” track and not have to open MC to do the routings and I don’t consider the track instruments complete until you can save the audio routing
For real? Does this include using the rack “the old way”? If so, what were they thinking? 
I flat out assume that I’m not the only one loading, deleting and reloading VSTis all the time. This would mess up all arrangements. Or have I misunderstood something here?
(Still on the fence vs. 7.5…)
r,
j,
Anything new missed in Preferences?
Well in the old rack, if you had say three instruments in it and decided to empty slot 2, the slot ID would stay as number 2 but sending nothing,now, if you repeat that in the new rack, the slot disappears and synth ID no 3 moves up to become synth ID no 2…
The question that needs clarification, is, does this keep and change absolutely every parameter related to synth id slot no 3 to synth id slot no 2?
If you had a mult kontakt for example with 16 midi channels with each instance outputting to say 8 stereo outs, that gives you 128 channels of audio routed to the mixer with all the sends, inserts etc and other channel info. If the whole lot moved up to a different slot id and did not carry precise intact data with it, the room for potential disaster in a substantial template or project that well under way doesn’t bear thinking about.
Add into that equation a fully loaded GA 2 se which can’t as of yet remember its own mapping and the inability of track instruments to remember their own names and channels and one can’t help but wonder why SB continue to bring a flagship product to market when it’s still not working in a reliable and consistent manner.
7.5 is a good step forward, but again has the potential to take two steps back!!!
As far as I can tell, everything stays “intact” when the ID changes in the rack. I have removed several rack instruments in a very large Cubase 7.5 project and everything works exactly as before. However, it is a bummer that the ordering of your instruments in the rack gets all messed up. I have noticed that if you use Instruments Tracks instead, the ordering doesn’t change when you replace an instrument. So for that reason alone, I will probably convert all of my existing rack instruments to Instrument Tracks. That will be a fun couple of hours.
Whew. So it’s just a visual issue then. I can live with that.
r,
j,
But with track instruments you can’t give them meaningful names and channels change if you move something s because at the moment it doesn’t remember them…? We’d all best keep a good old fashioned pen and paper track sheet handy 
I noticed that the first audio output of an Instrument Track (as shown in the automation “lanes”) cannot be renamed. It will always revert back to the default name. (For instance, if I rename the first Groove Agent audio output to “Groove Agent 1” it will revert back to “Master”.) However, the name that is shown in the Mix Console channel is the name of the Instrument Track itself. And that does appear to stay the same (unless you rename the Instrument Track). So if I name my Instrument Track “Groove Agent”, that is what is shown as the first audio output in the Mix Console. I can live with that.
Its exactly what I’m hoping to do too. I thought that was the new thing and what I could do? 
Best Regards
Freddie
Obviously some of us here are not used to work in large projects.
One drum, one snare, a banjo, one bass and a guitar and they are all set. A BIG projects is obviously when you add a tambourine + whooping 16ch of Audio tracks total…
Only vocals in a pop song for me are around 100 tracks alone… after edit. Before 150 up to 200 tracks audio of vocals. Take lanes almost 8-20 tracks on each track
Dumped audio tracks with Synths and FX 20 tracks. All eight channels of Omnisphere + almost 8-24 ch of Kontakt 5. 3-4 tracks of Trilian, 4-6 tracks of Stylus RMX. Add many Instrument tracks with Massive etc…
Do you want to hear film, score projects…? You don’t even want to go there. 
Best Regards
Freddie
Hey guys, sorry for rebumping this but I think it’s a pretty interesting discussion you were having here. I am also having this ‘dilemma’ of choosing between rack or track instruments for creating drums using a drum sampler. I want full control of my individual drum samples (meaning midi editing as well as audio [eq, effects and what not].
Now, say I’ll be using Grooveagent SE. I load it up with samples. Build a pattern, put it as a midi on the track. I ‘dissolve part’ so that each pitch gets its own track. For as far as I can tell there’s two options:
What I am wondering now is which option is most preferable in your eyes. I have looked at the VST performance of both methods, and they don’t seem to vary that much. In practice it seems that the second option is most effective for workflow as you can treat the instrument track as an audio track for EQ, effects and automation on that, as well as being able to edit the midi at the same place. Still, I have a feeling that loading so many instances of one VSTi is a bit ‘messy’ - and just not the right way. But I’m not sure if that’s my own OCD or if it actually matters
I think there were some good arguments from both side in the above topic. Could someone tell me why loading many instances of one VSTi might be a bad idea? Or is it just a gut feeling that is not really applicable nowadays while working with high-performance (multi-core) systems? [In my case I’ll prop be working with around max. 10 tracks for rhytm in electronic music]. I’m curious 
Well, Kashi. That’s a bit tricky to answer these days. In the “old” days, with single core processors, it was was always preferable to use less instances whenever possible. However, that changed radically when multi-core processors came on the the scene. These days it’s not so clear cut. It depends on whether the plug-in is multi-core aware (not all of them are) or not.
A multi-core aware plug-in will spread the processing load over the cores, so guess the old rule with using less instances is still preferable.
A non-multi-core plug-in, on the other hand, will use a single core for all its processing. This means that, in the worst case, one core may overload while the others are running idle. In this case, running multiple instances (at least as many as you have cores) is preferable.
At least this is how I’ve got it explained to me. I believe I’ve read somewhere that Cubase to tries to assign plug-ins to separate cores (as far as possible), in an effort to try and spread the load.
Great thread, been a little confused with the difference with these tracks, as i was wondering why i had 5 instances of GA running one for each drum part… if GA has multi outs why would it be used this way?
If your computer cannot handle such a project, then it’s a bad idea.
Seriously, you won’t really know a bad idea until it is tried. There are so many variances between computers anymore, that stating something as being a generally bad idea, eh… really might be a bad idea?
Well, you sort of answered it yourself there.
I use an instrument called Chromaphone which just does one-sound-per-instance, so a single instance is not an option for a drum set. Doing it this way though, IMHO, makes the process of organizing and handling drum sounds much easier (for me) than to have to learn yet another VSTi specific multi-timbral system. Processing wise, I have no problems, but that’s on my system and may have been different elsewhere.
In the earlier days of computers in music there were things like CV and MIDI flying across the wires to and from some sort of computer (a sequencer or what would be the equivalent of a “PC” today), and at that time such devices were much more straight forward (dedicated to few tasks) and instead You had to do more, manually.
Nowadays, the components in your computer being much more modular and generally sort of multi-tasking, and I am not just talking about cores on the main CPU, but things like video boards with many capabilities, etc., that processing power is so much more distributed. This makes it more complicated to make general statements of what constitutes a good or bad idea.
One thing I pretty much always lived by is: try it (whatever an it may be).
The reason I don’t use track instruments is because to this day they still can’t be saved when selected. (save selected tracks)
Wouldn’t it be nice to “select all” meaning every track and save it? As it stands, if you select any track instrument the “save selected tracks” will not appear.
So here is another issue I wish would be fixed before more VSTI’s, improved Loop Mash, and new features that will undoubtedly be released in C8.
Does anyone know if this is going to be fixed with the next version? As it stands, this doesn’t allow me to use track instruments.