"I typed a detailed post about this issue...." I wish I could have read it. Is it possible it loaded into another thread? I still don't remember if, by accident, I put this thread in the MIR forum, but I never go to MIR, so I cant imagine I did. The forum behavior has been a little flaky lately. I have learned the hard way to copy my posts before they're sent.
Please understand that I know I can get an obscene amount of tracks from and memory within one VE instance. The line I am trying to draw is to keep Flute Matrices in a Flute VE, Oboe matrices in an Oboe VE, et cetera, allowing for the principal instruments in a standard orchestra.
I am hoping I don't need to go the Winds / Brass / Percussion / Strings grouping by virtue of a limit to eight instances (or any mixture thereof for individual and grouped VE's, topping at eight). And I note with concern that the manual's examples are grouped this way.
Thanks for your confirmations. My next step tomorrow will be to see if, when I double click the VE Ensemble in the channel strip and do the "Show Window" dance, I will see the display by MIDI port, or if I'll need to scroll down sixteen instruments or manually select the MIDI port to find what patch I'm triggering.
If I immediately see what I'm playing, then 8 instances is tolerable. I don't care what instance it is, if I can see what I'm playing when the VE edit screens open directly. If I have to play with MIDI ports to obviate the eight instance limit, so be it.
But if I have to hunt down whichever of, say, 128 instruments I might be playing in that one compendium of a Winds VE Pro instance, sorting through flutes, then oboes to clarinets, finally discovering the Bassoon DYN 2s that the channel stip is actually playing.... then the template I had imagined will simply not be tenable. That is not a real-world layout.
I will trust for better from VSL. I just can't explain why VSL didn't just tell us about the limit.