Hello all. First post here! I’ve downloaded the demo and I’m coming to grips with the tracker paradigm. The speed at which you can compose is amazing 
Okay, so when i load a vsti and press play the vsti begins to play even though i’ve not inputted any notes. i’ve assigned the vsti to it’s own empty track, but it still ‘sounds’.
Any ideas?
Thanks! I look forward to hanging around here 
You can’t really assign a VSTi to a track. It gets “assigned” by itself depending on where the triggering notes are. So the VSTi can be triggered from any track.
But are you saying there aren’t any notes at all, anywhere in the pattern, and it still plays?
Which VSTi is it?
Actually you can 
If you have a VSTi in your song with notes being triggered on tracks, 1, 2, 3, 7, etc., Renoise will try to route the VSTi’s output to those separate tracks whenever possible as you have already mentioned (though sometimes it simply doesn’t work very well, since the VSTi can physically only output to 1 track at a time). If you assign the VSTi to a particular track then its output will remain locked to that track, regardless of where the notes were triggered.
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Ooops. Yeah, you’re right. I stand corrected. 
thanks guys. problem solved. it was a stuck note! 
A follow up question:
why do vsti’s have the option to ‘assigned to track’ if you can input notes on any track, regardless of what you enter into this field?
thanks again.
VSTi’s can physically only send their audio output to 1 track at a time (in Renoise at least). Let’s say that you have a VSTi playing some kind of long string pad sound on track 1. If you play some new notes on track 2 while the previous notes can still be heard, the audio output will instantly cut off from track 1 and change to track 2.
To hear this more clearly, do not put any effects on track 1, but add a lowpass filter to track 2 and set the cutoff frequency quite low. Now take a VSTi which can produce some synth pads (or any sound with a long decay), then record a note in track 1 on step 1. Record a different note in track 2 but further down the pattern on step 16 or something. Make each note quite different so you can clearly hear the difference between them (like C3 and G5).
Now play the pattern and you should notice that as soon as the 2nd note begins to play, you can no longer hear any of the VSTi playing through track 1… it is simply cut off and sent to track 2 instead. Now if you assign the VSTi to track 1 you will never hear the lowpass effect, but if you assigned it to track 2 you will always hear the lowpass.
So why is this option needed? Well, it’s up to you to find a use for it really. For me personally I like to use it with drum synths such as Drumatic or Microtonic. I might be playing my kick drum on track 1, high hat on track 2, snare on track 3, etc., because I prefer to arrange all the separate sounds this way (instead of multiple note columns in a single track), but I also want to apply an effect such as a compressor to all of the drum sounds together. Normally this isn’t possible because it is trying (and failing) to play the notes on 3 different tracks, but if I put my compressor on track 3, then I also assign/lock the VSTi to track, I can get what I want.
(I could also use a send-track for this, but that’s not the point of this example)
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