Well, that's what it sounds like anyway. I decided to get creative and installed a few free VSTs in my VST directory today. And I managed to dress up a couple of my songs so that they were sounding pretty cool. But then I loaded another song in which I'd just used the standard MS Wavetable stuff, and the VSTs had bled over into it, making a terrific mess of things. I remembered I had changed the default VST from Coyote over to one of the new ones, so I went back into preferences/MIDI drivers and changed it back. Well that took care of the strange sounding "regular" songs. But now when I go to play the songs that I've dressed up with the new VSTs, it's just s swirling whining bunch of mess. The drums, which are Real Drums are the only part that haven't been affected by it.

I just now went back into one of the songs and straightened out the mess so that it sounded decent again with the new VSTs. I re-saved the song, using BiaB's "Save Special" option -- figuring it couldn't hurt. Then I immediately called up the saved file. Well, it was better. Now only two instruments are out of place. They're forgetting the voices I assigned to them and selecting something else. So I reset these two instruments again, re-saved the file, then called it back up. Same thing. The two instruments won't remember the voices I selected for them. But the other two instruments in this song are doing fine. Oh, and just to make things really weird -- one of the instruments that forgets its setting shares the same VST with another instrument that doesn't forget its setting. The other instrument that forgets its setting is using another VST all by itself.

SO I went and saved the banks. A saved bank file for each instrument. I also saved the presets for the helluvit. When I called the file up again, those two instruments had reverted to the same two incorrect selections, but when I loaded the saved bank files, the settings were restored. Well, they were until I started up the tune. One instrument played the wrong voice for a split second then switched to the correct one. But the other instrument insisted on staying with the incorrect voice. So I loaded the bank again while the song was running, and this time it took. Finally! Am I going to have to go through this every time I use a VST?

So anyway, while all this was going on, I was reading up on the Help file on VSTs. Pretty straightforward stuff. One thing it mentioned was Forcing a MIDI channel. I'd just left that selection alone, but I figured I'd better do it, so I forced each plugin to a certain channel . . . hrm -- is it possible to "force" a plug-in to more than one channel? Apparently so. I'm listening to the problem tune right now and the two instruments that share that VST are behaving normally . . . for now.

So, what's the secret to getting the VSTs to remember how I've set them so that when I call the file up in the future it will sound the way it's supposed to? Is saving bank files the only way to do this?

Okay, well I have another problem tune with VSTs that have forgotten their settings that I need to try and straighten out. Stay tuned and wish me luck.

Best,
Michael

My Music:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/albums