Playing a VSTi on multiple Tracks at Once

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Hi,

  • 2 channels, one with panning set all to the left, the other all to the right
  • playing 2 notes of the same VST instrument

problem: when the note on one channel gets played, it sounds like the other channel gets instantly muted or stopped, with a loud clicking sound. I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t sound like that.

Happens with any VSTi I tried. Does not happen with sampled instruments. It sounds normal when both channels have the same panning. The more different the panning, the louder the clicks. Happens with 2.0 as well as 2.1. Using native VSTis under Linux.

Check the attached song file - listen to one loudspeaker only, you will hear the instrument be turned on/off.

2

I don’t think this issue is easily addressable, as MDApiano does not support channelling, thus you cannot use it on more than one track at the same time. what happens, as you can see in

“Instruments Settings” => “VST Instrument Properties”

is that, if you do not assign the VST to a specific track, it will keep on switching from a track to another each time a note is played on a new track (by “new” I mean a track which is not the one where the last triggered note is being played). This causes the click you hear because of the panning change.

I don’t know if there is any channelling-capable Linux VST, anyway in Windows and MacOS these issues are addressed using the procedure described here under the “Using a VST Instrument Alias through channelling” section. In the specific case of MDApiano, this would not work on Windows and MacOS either, since MDApiano does not support channelling as said above.

If you assign the VST to a track, for example track01 in your example, the instrument will be always played on the same track, regardless of where the notes are placed, so you will always hear the sound coming from left in the example, but you will hear no clicks.
An obvious workaorund is to use two MDApiano instruments

3

As IT said: You can not play the same VSTi instance on multiple tracks at once. What happens in your example, is that its quickly switching from one to the other track, thus the click.

For beginners, especially those who are used to sampled instruments this is not really obvious. Has anyone an idea how we could make that more obvious then?

4

what about showing in red the font of the everchanging “Track1”/“Ttrack2” text?

  
on_txtAssignedToTrack_TextChanged()  
{  
 if(!checkbox_AssignedToTrack.isChecked())  
 {  
 txtAssignedToTrack->setFontColor(FF0000);  
 }  
}

can’t really think of anything less stupid but also not invasive

5

I see. So its actually not a Renoise issue (sorry).

Let’s say I am developing a VSTi using Juce - any hints on how I would enable this channeling feature? :slight_smile:

6

You can’t directly do this. The only thing you could do is creating a multitimbral plugin with multiple outputs. You can then trigger the VSTi with separate MIDI channels (aliases in Renoise), and route its output to separate tracks (you’ll see a routing button in Renoise as soon as the VSTi has more than two channels/busses).

Not sure it thats really worth the trouble. Simply creating multiple instance / instruments of the same VSTi also does the job is is much easier to handle, isn’t it?

7

Thanks for explaining. The only difference would be that with “channeling”, you could have one set of parameters controlling the VSTi in multiple tracks. This would be handy, but maybe you’re right, adding this to the VSTi is not worth the effort.