Stopping signal when disabling a VST instrument?

[HenryJicha]

Hi folks,

I'm a quite new Live user and struggling with "trails" when disabling VSTs. I'm working with a few different soft synths (Hybrid 3, Z3TA+ 2) and have noticed what feels like odd behavior: when disabling the plugin using the device activator while a sound is playing, the sound is seemingly put on "hold" - I can wait for several seconds, plenty long for any release to have completed, and then when reactivating the plugin it'll pick up where it left off when disabled instead of being silent. Worse, when I hold a note and disable while the note is still held, when reactivating either synth the note will act as if it has a sustain pedal held indefinitely and not stop playing until I touch the same key again after reactivating. Live's native instruments seem to do the former, but not the latter, on a quick (but not exhaustive test).

This is playing havoc with my ability to plan synth patch changes for live use while minimizing CPU, especially since Hybrid isn't built to handle MIDI patch changes neatly. I've set up an instrument rack that can use the chain selector to switch between active instances of Hybrid/Z3TA each in a chain within a track and turn on/off the instances, and that will correctly change the new sound, but it's not ok to have old release / trails / potentially even held notes waiting for me like an evil trap if I need to switch back to the first patch later.

Is there any good solution here? Is this a bug in the disable behavior, or is the disable behavior configurable in any way? What I'd like on disable is for the output to stop (and the CPU hit to drop off) but for the plugin to still treat the release/reverb/etc. as if time was still passing, if that makes sense. Failing that, to essentially mute everything, so the next time I switch to that patch it starts out completely silent (this might actually even be the preferred outcome).

Better still would be an easy way to keep trails going across patch changes smoothly without needing to keep separate synth instances open on separate tracks and take the associated CPU hit, but I don't think that's possible without a synth that natively supports it (like Omnisphere). Incidentally, tips for that? There doesn't seem to be a way to use MIDI to assign inputs so I assume I'd have to do an automated volume fade on the first patch that's aligned with the release, but that feels imperfect since new notes from the second patch would still be hitting the first one, just softer until the fade was complete.

If it helps context, all of this is specifically with the intent of using MIDI (either by hardware or using Ableton-housed clips so I don't have to press any buttons) to change patches while playing for live use.

Thanks kindly!