What are vtracks?

The DPS12 has (per project) 250 vtracks. You can think of each of these vtracks as a computer audio file or a reel of tape. Whatever you record _has_ to be stored in one or more vtracks. Now, you can record whatever you like up to the maximum 250 vtracks, but the DPS12 can only playback back up to 12 of these at once.

To help you visualise it, imagine the DPS is like a reel to reel tape deck, and has 12 spools. On each of these spools you can place one reel of tape, containing a mono track. You can record a different musical part on each of these 12 reels of tape, and play them all together. But: because you actually have 250 reels of tape at your disposal, you can freely exchange which reels are in the machine with the ones that are on the floor.

So, you record a vocal onto reel 1, but decide you want to have a few more takes of the same vocal. You take reel 1 off, and put reel 13 in it's place. When done recording onto that, you swap it with reel 14 and so on. When you've recorded enough takes, you decide which was the best take (let's say, reel 14), and you thus leave reel 14 on spool 1.

Back to the DPS: when you create a new project, the DPS12 automatically assigns vtracks 1 to 12 to "real tracks" 1 to 12. When you record into track 1, the audio is stored therefore in vtrack 1. If you want to do another take (like in our example above), you would assign vtrack 13 to track 1 (effectively putting vtrack 1 on the floor and vtrack 13 ready for recording) and record on track 1.

You are always assigning vtracks to physical tracks, not the other way around. Vtracks contain the audio, whereas a physical track on the DPS doesn't actually exist - think of it more like a "playback channel". You assign any vtrack to one of the twelve playback channels. When you are recording, you are recording via one or more playback channels directly into whichever vtrack is currently assigned to that playback channel.