Hi guys,

I posted this over at Presonus' forum, but it's not getting much attention there, so I thought I would throw it out here as well, to see if anyone has an answer. I have a hard time believing that I am the only one who is baffled by this behavior. I am mostly referring to version 2 here, but it might also apply to version 1. Anyway, I am just going to copy/paste my fairly long post. If you're not a Studio One user, it's probably not worth your time to read it.

It revolves around multi-output VSTi plugins and instruments tracks. Let's say I load Kontakt and enable the first four stereo outputs. Studio One makes this SUPER easy to do, and sets up the routing for me with a mixer track for each, which is awesome. So now I create 4 Instrument tracks and route the MIDI output from each to Kontakt, and this is where the problem starts. The tracks all get linked together in a way that does not make sense to me. If I change the color of one track, either in the mixer or in the track view, it changes the color of ALL of the tracks routed to that instrument. And if I move a track in the mixer, it also moves the respective Instrument track, often with very unpredictable results.

I have a very specific color scheme and track-order I use to keep organized, so this actually is a deal-breaker for me, and I cannot find a permanent fix for it. The closest thing I have found is that Instrument tracks show the audio track to which they are linked in their Inspector, and if you set it to "None," you can remove the link, and it works as I want it to. BUT... Once you reload the session, it automatically re-links all Instrument tracks to their mixer tracks. And the same things goes for templates--I made a template that had all tracks de-linked, and it worked great, but as soon as I load it up and start a new session from said template, Studio One re-links all of the tracks, thus undoing my fix. (We're talking about a lot of tracks here, so it's not really feasible for me to un-set all of the links every time I load up a session.)

What I really want is to just have plain MIDI tracks that have no knowledge of any audio tracks, so I can color and move them all arbitrarily without affecting any others. It seems like Presonus designed Instrument tracks only with single-output instruments in mind.

Am I missing something here, or is this just the way S1 is designed? If I can't fix the issue, I would rather just stay with Cubase, because as many issues I have with Cubase, it at least does this correctly, and it is REALLY important to me.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your help!
(If my explanation is not clear enough, let me know, and I can try to post a quick little video later today to illustrate.)

That's pretty much the way it currently works. You can independently color channels in the mixer in that case but if you color a track in arrange, it recolors all of the instrument output channels in the mixer the same color. You can directly color clips on the track without it doing that though, which isn't very hard, right click menu.

It's been talked about multiple times there and officially noted (I think) which is probably why your thread asking about it again isn't garnering much attention. The "track order relationship" thing too, which may need a closer look... and is (again, I think) already on the FR list, de-linking.

If it's that important and a show stopper and more of an annoyance than was the reason you initially decided to not use Cubase in this case, yeah, use Cubase and check back later?

Annoyances are annoyances and (I do agree) it's usually best to use whatever has fewer, or at least fewer that are important to you. "Lesser of two evils" and all that.

Hope that helps a little.

Ah, okay, I actually did not realize that. I did a couple searches, but it's kind of a vague issue, so I had a hard time finding many good results (found a couple threads, but nothing really significant).

Oh well, I guess I'll just hope they change the behavior in v.3. It's not like I'm dying to switch, but I do really like everything about S1 v.2 aside from this, but unfortunately, this does happen to be a big problem for me... I mostly like Cubase, but I really hate the idiotic window management, and would love to find a suitable replacement, S1 being the only "almost-there" candidate.

Anyway, thanks for the reply!

Normally, 2.5 should come before 3

1.5 was a big update, and free.

Someone said that a new version could be released during this month.

I will definitely be keeping an eye on it. I just kind of assumed this kind of behavior change would be something they would put into a major version upgrade rather than a .x update, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.