Why does associated audio not choose empty audiotracks?

I've searched the manual, but either it's not in there, or I'm using the wrong search words, but I can't figure out what to turn off or on to prevent video with associated audio files overwrting existing audio on tracks, even if there's an empty space available on the next track.

I.e. If I have 30 seconds of intro music on A1 and I drag a 5 second Video with Audio to V1, the associated audio will *always* overwrite the audio on A1. But when I drag that video file to V2 the audio jumps to A2 as well. Why? It's fine where it is. What's the reason it's moving with the video?
What kind of Konami combi of auto track selectors/destination designators do I need to set?

I'm putting this in the beta forum, since it's something I've been experiencing in this version as well as previous ones, but since it's not a technical bug (or is it?) there's no need to retroactively put it in a 16.X patch.

That's actually how it should work when dragging. I'm glad BMD fixed it.

You can add A2 manually and set the Destination Control to that track, then add the clip with a shortcut.

In most video editing systems that I'm aware of, tracks are dedicated to certain tasks. (FCPX is the big exception, where they did away with tracks and have their magnetic timeline and you designate clips by Role.)

So you don't want audio moving arbitrarily and the way most handle it by default is to have the sync'd audio appear in the A track corresponding to the V track. So you're V1 is likely to be, say, your interviewee, while V2 might be B-roll, which might have audio you want to sneak in. (V3 might be for additional B-roll, and V4 might be for titles, etc.) So audio from the interview will go into A1 and B-roll audio will go into A2. And you then apply track-level audio effects to the audio tracks.

In that traditional use, you'd add, say, A5 and dedicate that to music. You wouldn't use V5 -- or at a minimum, you wouldn't drag video with linked audio to V5. If you're editing to the music and the music defines the video, you'd then lock A5 so it doesn't get clobbered and doesn't move when ripple operations happen.

That way, when you export your multiple audio tracks for an audio editor, they don't have to pick through your various tracks and clips to figure out where dialogue is, where sound effects are, where the music is. And since Resolve has a DAW (digital audio workstation), Fairlight, built in, keeping the contents of tracks straight and not automatically moving them to empty tracks is important.

That said, Resolve has a couple of mechanisms for determining which tracks are affected by various operations, depending on what you're doing:

If you are sending clips from the source viewer to the timeline viewer (by things like F9 or the Insert Clip button) then the red boxes around V1 and A1 (by default) on the left side of the timeline indicate where video and audio will go. You can click on A2 to make the box red to insert to V1 and A2 instead.

If you are dragging a clip into the timeline, the V1-A1, V2-A2, V3-A3 default mechanism is done.

If you are doing other kinds of track/clip manipulations, including copying/pasting clips -- which can potentially copy and paste MANY audio track -- then the Auto Track Selector (the "<>" icon on the left) dictates what tracks participate in those operations.

It's not a bug, it's the way track-based editors work. FCPX doesn't have tracks, so when you drag a video with audio into the timeline, the audio just fits in wherever it can. You then use Roles to decide what virtual track the audio ends up in. So if you designate multiple clips' audio to be "Dialogue" when you export from FCPX for your audio people, it will create one or more Dialogue tracks and only Dialogue-tagged audio will end up in those tracks. As if you'd designated A1-A4 as "Dialogue 1", "Dialogue 2", etc.

I think this approach is brilliant, and have since FCPX came out. But many tradition-bound editors hated it with a passion. (Admittedly, the export I described had quirks and didn't work well in early FCPX, which didn't help to overcome resistance to trackless editing.) But that's not the way Resolve works -- and it would be really hard to make Fairlight work with it -- but Resolve's certainly not alone.