Scott Lindstrom

I keep experimenting and I've got the VST thing figured out. It's a matter of doing things in the proper order. So, disregard.

But the DELETE / CRASH thing continues. 

Additionally, I've tried to add plugins from eMu and I get a "streaming engine could not initialize" error.  Any thoughts on that?

I appreciate the input and agree - starting over often works.

I'm making progress but it's two steps forward, one step back.

Turns out, all those instruments in the drop-down did NOT exist - MIDI worked, there just wasn't anything for it to trigger.  I was fooling around in Preferences/VST, did a manual scan and suddenly I've got hundreds of WORKING instruments, even in a MIDI track. But it's not all good news. With VST Scan set to AUTO, it doesn't find anything on startup so, every time I start the program, I have to go there and do a MANUAL scan.  Is there a fix for this?

Another problem that has come up - if I try to DELETE a track the program becomes unresponsive and has to be shut down. Meaning I not only have to restart it, I have to do that manual scan thing.

Thanks to both of you for your input on this.

The part that confused me is that when you add a Midi track, there's a dropdown in that track that lists instruments (Church Organ, Marimba, etc). Since that's there, I expected it to create that sound for incoming midi. Why else would it be there?

Since my original post, I found "Add Instrument" which might be a work-around except that I get 15 piano tracks and one drum track and haven't found any way to change the instruments or presets. 

I'm not a complete novice - I started with Cadenza 25 years ago and have used Steinberg, Cubase, Cakewalk (from maybe 10 years ago) and the internal sequencers in my boards to run various modules.  There's always a learning curve but this is starting out slower than I expected.

Midi track ---

Set Midi Channel -      Set Bank (None is only option)        Select Patch from drop down  (since they're listed, I assume they exist)

And nothing happens.  The only way I can get it record events at all is to set an output to a drum map and then it reads and records  the mini input.  Which is not what I want.  And the selected instrument doesn't play.  EVER.  I also tried recording as an audio track using the midi input.  Output is set to the Realtech driver and internal speakers.

Demo songs play perfectly.

What have I missed? What's the secret handshake?  Help please...

Scott