Remember that it's going to depend on the soft-synth too: for example, Cakewalk's older Dimension Pro doesn't support patch changes (probably doesn't need to); neither does Big Tick's Cheeze Machine II (where it would make sense). So it's not a panacea.
Interesting as there were no mix changes! The only differences were I exported as a 24 bit wav from CbB, loaded into SoundForge, reversed it and stuck it on the end (I said it was black hole like!) and exported from there - same bit rate too, so presumably (and I haven't listened closely) the export algorithm in SF is "better" than CbB's (or it's psychosomatic?).
I'm not a huge reverb person (there are some reverbs on individual instruments and quite a few delays too). I have a super-extended mix to post later (it's a cunning one that fits in nicely with the idea of neutron stars colliding).
Black Hole Mix
It's because there's no way for CbB to "know" which audio/MIDI tracks should be solo'd as that routing is managed opaquely within Kontakt (or other plug-ins; this isn't Kontakt specific).
That's really great to hear - it was all done on headphones (monitors currently mothballed for space reasons) so I was a bit worried about how the frequency balance would work. And I was having to work with (not that I knew at the time) a failing PSU on my audio interface...maybe I should work more like that ?
I'm really liking this - even more than my own Tungsten+ theme which I posted here! My one "complaint" (which applies to virtually all the themes I've looked at) is that the PRV looks awful unless you change the background colours to pale - the Mercury ones are actually pretty perfect).
I also (and no fault of the theme) had to change a couple of the colours in Preference\Colours to work a little better - something like Marker colour doesn't come from the Theme but from the Preferences\Colours section.
This would preclude (without some horrendous Reaper-like GUI :-)) mixing multiple tracks/busses to feed to a sidechain input - the CbB approach is more flexible than this.
http://www.alien8.co.uk/audio/AftermathOfCollidingNeutronStars.mp3
Although I normally do space-rock tunes, this is a bit of a different direction (ambient/synthy). Very much a Work In Progress at the moment, but I think it's still nice as it is. Listen on headphones!
Drop out of comping mode into sound on sound and you don't get the split at least - I agree this is bizarre and unwanted behaviour so should be changed.
Can anyone get the "SurgeEffectsBank VST3" to do anything in CbB? I've installed it, it appears in the right folder, but doesn't get picked up as a VST in CbB (check the registry, not just CbB).