Track Mode Workflow (Adding new instruments)

[shofel]

Hey all,

I'm working on a template right now using Track Mode, spent a good few hours yesterday learning about the quirks. It seems like you can get pretty close to Ableton's workflow with this, which is perhaps the one feature I'd ever swap FL studio for.

I love the features it provides, especially that once you have an instrument track on the playlist, you can just double click it to open the instrument. What I was also hoping for, is that it'd be very easy to make some mixer track/playlist templates that I could just clone and easily manipulate.

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Making a couple of named tracks, assigning them to audio tracks/mixer tracks, easy peasy! Now I'll just drop an instrument on the track and it'll take the color, the mixer track, the name. Man FL studio is amazing, you can customize EVERYTHING!

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Wait a minute..

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Turns out.. instrument tracks are weird.. Things I've tried as workarounds for this to still make this a quick workflow, while retaining the easy mixer track/playlist "template" style;
- Assign an instrument through "Track mode > Instrument", but this behaves in the same way as adding an instrument by dragging it in from the browser.
- Load an instrument in the channel rack, assign the instrument to one of the template mixer tracks. Assign that instrument through "Track mode > Instrument > Use existing channel";

reroute channel.png

- Delete one of the mixer tracks that is "occupied" by an audio track which was assigned by selecting their respective "Track mode > Audio Track > Insert". Insert the generator plugin as an instrument track, hoping it would auto-assign to the first empty mixer track (so, the one in my template). It doesn't. I can't figure out how FL studio decided where to put the instrument on the mixer track.
- Assign "dummy" instruments to my templates, and swap them out with the "real" instruments I want to replace them with. This way, the mixer track placement is retained, all I need to do is change the name of the track/clip in the playlist.

The fastest way I've found as of yet;
1. Make a playlist template with 4 audio tracks, 4 "dummy" instrument tracks with a sampler or something (With one track above it, functioning purely as a bus for this group, it is not necessary functionally but I would love to organise my playlist like this).
2. Audio tracks work fine, I can drop in a sample, auto name the sample and it will take the name/colour of the mixer track.
3. If I want to change one of my instruments, I can drop it on one of the instrument tracks. It will retain it's position on the mixer rack (and also its routing), but I will have to rename/recolour my instrument.

Obviously this has two glaring issues;
- Adding new instruments if I want to go over my template limit is still tedious;
- My template will often contain empty slots which take up unnecessary space in my mixer track and playlist.

TL;DR
All I want is for the screenshot below to be a thing, does anyone have some kind of workaround for this? Will this ever be a feature?:

justletmedothis.png

[mrsieb]

Clone the instrument track, there you can even ...