How to remove VST instruments

How do I remove VST instruments from the track/rack list from the righthand side of the the project window? Somehow I ended up with multiple copies of Halion SE and now I can’t get rid of them. It’s easy to add instruments, but when they are there they are stuck for good it seems.

Yep. Seems like an oversight.

Click on HALion SE, on the top you can select “No VST Instrument”. If it’s an Instrument Track, you can also remove the track itself.

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The 1st part doesn’t work for me.

With the Instrument Rack on the screen (F11), I click the Halion SE instrument to select it, then click on Rack then click No VST Instrument.

The Halion SE instrument is still there. Tried refreshing the rack, toggling F11, it’s still there.

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You must click on HALion Sonic SE (or whatever plugin), not on Rack or Track, that’s only for adding a plugin.

Plugin.jpg

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Good. First time in twenty years anything I asked about my music programs on the internet ever got solved.

What you didn’t say was LEFT-CLICK on the title.
Don’t right-click like I did, for weeks on end.

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Just read this - that’s such a pain - but now I see how to do it - I can rid self of those pesky extra instruments
Been using cubase since the dawn of time
:laughing: :bulb:

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OMG !
Why so DIfficult!!?

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This is a serious user interface design question: If left clicking on a popup menu (the way popup menus work) and selecting “no plugin” is “difficult,” and also selecting the track that has the instrument, and using “delete track” is difficult, then what would a “not difficult” way of doing it be?
How do you make this “less difficult” without changing something else into a “too cluttered” direction?
(For example: “A command bar where you type everything you want to do as text commands” would be super easy to find, but probably not very easy to learn …)

we should be able to delete it all from within the sequencer, without going to a separate pop up.
I’d argue that you should be able to click the track, and hit the “delete” on your keyboard and be done with it.

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So how do I select “nothing” such that pressing delete deletes nothing?
Or should there always be something deleted, so if I hit the delete key, there’s always something deleted? Maybe the entire project if I click in a non-track area? Sometimes we want to delete projects, after all!
(And once you have a bigger layout, there is no non-track area.)

Currently, delete-track is bound to shift-delete. You’d have to actually open the edit menu to find this out, though. That’s where I typically go, in any program, when I want to delete something, though, so that doesn’t seem super crazy.

I think the main problem here is that there are too many functions overall. Any large, professional program (Altium Designer, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, Visual Studio, Photoshop, and so on) suffers the same problem; there’s so many features, it’s impossible to provide only a simple interface.

I was thinking you selected the track, in the track panel.
It could be only when you select an item, like a track, instrument, midi file, audio file.

I guess I’m just spoiled from reason and reaper, but want the advanced features.

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Thanks to the users who figured out how to delete VST instruments! I’ve been using Cubase since the Atari ST, and I have to say that each “upgrade” makes the program harder to use. My current computer isn’t compatible with Cubase past 9.5, so I don’t know how bad 10, 11, or 12 are. But I really think that major mistakes were made in the 7 “upgrade” and it only got worse in 9.5, where everything you need to do is hidden in some teeny tiny corner. I want Cubase to go backwards and fix bugs and make each version compatible with the maximum number of operating systems possible. I don’t want constant changes to the interface. Except after they break it, which they definitely did in version 7. From my experience moving from 7 to 9, they broke even more things. If every year the design of a musical instrument was changed so that notes were not where they used to be, no one could become a virtuoso.

Welcome to the forum.

The procedure to remove VST instruments from your project has been completely unchanged since Cubase SX1 from 2002, or possibly even earlier versions. Click the VSTi name, then a list of your installed VSTis appears, where you can click “No VST Instrument” at the top of the list to remove it. Same thing as always.

As pointed out by other users, you can also just right click and remove the Instrument Tracks themselves from the Track List to the left of the Project Window, which is even easier than the old method.

Sometimes, things needs to be moved around in order to modernize the DAW and improve ease of use and workflow. You can probably get used to the changes from each version in like 2 or 3 days, but if you’re waiting 5 or so years between updates, of course you’ll feel confused once you finally get to try a new version.

Since Cubase 9.5 was released, the interface has been made significantly more consistent and easier to follow.

Thank you Hurmpie for the original solution and John_Jones for clarifying left-click. Consequently I didn’t waste too much time sorting this out.

I think too that it should be done directly at the channel as with all other channel types in the main window; why make it different and add more steps to it? Jejeje, I’m here for the same reason.
I couldn’t delete it, and although I’ve been using Cubase for about 10 years, it seems counterintuitive to me because I’ve never used instrument channels before. Thank you for the answer.

Thank you! I thought my DAW had broken jajajaja; it’s a little bit weird the way to do it.