when is the next fix ?

Its rare for you to use more than 8 layers… That’s because it’s irrelevant to you and a ton of work, but not to me, nor to a great deal of people who like detailed instruments… Specially drums. 15 years using HALion man… I want my HALion to be better than the FRIGGING Kontakt. and what’s better about Kontakt. It has A LOT OF content to chose from. WHy because people don’t sample anymore so they make sure they have tons of content. This is why HALion is not selling as it should. People don’t sample anymore.

I have my snare drums with tons of layers and have no problem getting the effect I’m going for which is realism and the response of it. NOR HALion chokes on them…
AND I’m a drummer and I don’t like drums libraries where the drums are not responsive and it sounds like a drum machine. My cymbals start from very lite taps to very loud smacks… Also round ribbon adds even more realism to the instrument.

I don’t use drum pads, didn’t mention that. Didn’t say I’m aiming detailed sample libraries to you or everyone but there are a lot of people that likes this. And ten years of people asking me for them is a lot of people. And a Lot of Download (wish I had a $1 for every download :cry: ) and very happy users because of the way the drums responded when they played them on their Edrum kits or the midi programming they did.
The GSCW kit I gave away in KVR were half on the tons of layers I had originally. When you want a tap on the snare, you get a tap on the snare L-R plus a bunch of others, thus removing the fake machine gun effect on lots of drum sampled libraries.

Obiously you don’t use HALion as I do and drums are not your game. :slight_smile:
Did you know you can program the velocities after the facts? and take advantage of the detailed sampled instrument? pencil tool in piano roll editor, select velocities and presto.

The argument is not that you can or can’t afford a pad with hi resolution midi but a lot of people do. And this involves those people. specially if you want your arrangement sounding realistic. When I record drummers and they screw up (and they do all the time or they want to record their own kit drum) I extract the midi notes from his playing and all his hits are converted to midi with velocity and for example, the Starclassic that I have sampled responds as it should and they have no clue I removed the original drums. Ex.2 I tell the guy don’t change the head now or by the end of the song you will be drooping the tune of the snare and your tom toms. “Nah I know what I’m doing”. :exclamation: ( “oh wow it did detune” ) So I have to fix the mistake in post. More money for me but I rather do it right once.

When I use my drum samples I have no problems nor all the elaborate apologetic cons you mentioned. Some artists can’t afford to pay for live drummers so I program them and Thank goodness for 128 layers divided by 24 or 28 samples layered. And also they are sick of EZD which is on every record hahaha!

The problem is Why the grain engine is so heavy? Why there is High or Extreme resolution in HALION and it chokes the computer?. I have a 6 Core AMD 3ghz. WHY user presets don’t show, etc, etc… and a ton of more relevant issues apart from been able to load more than 8 layers at once. WHY over a year to fix obvious problems and then come up with a H6 while H5 is going bananas? old history.

Anyways.

HALion needs work for all relevant issues that are affecting all the users (not just me). And I can rest assure you are not pushing HALion like we do. There is no big elaborate orchestral library nor gigantic sample piano libraries for HALion. I know piano players that can’t stand The Grand 3 because it does not response like a real piano and they like The WHITE GRAND or other large sampled Piano from a third party. And I say what? I love the grand 3 but I know what they mean.

Later I’ll give you an example of my drums.

GIRO,

I’ve never had problems getting third party libraries. They come with players.

I’ll concede that Halion might have shortcomings for doing a top notch super detailed drum set. What alternatives are there for similar money though, and how do they compare?

I’ve never tried to make a ‘super detailed’ real time drum set with things like realistic choking of sustained samples when the virtual head takes a second hit (is that possible in any sampler on the market?), squeaky pedals, and all the super detailed eccentricities of realistic drum playing may well require a custom engine designed specifically for percussion. I personally cannot imagine loading up such a program on my ancient PC and expecting it to work well ‘live’ without latency while other VSTi’s and stuff are also running at the same time in the same host. However, I have started with rather basic digital drum sets, and added some of those details in post.

For a super realistic and responsive real time drumming instrument…given the options I know of right now…I’d plan to serve such an electronic drum set from a dedicated PC (or isolate and run it discretely from the DAW on a high end PC), and sequence it using an old Atari ST (restored with a nice fresh cap job of course). I hate the latency issues with modern DAW systems…the Atari ST is rock solid and has superb resolution. They’re also pretty cheap.

Getting realistic ‘sounds’ spread across multiple triggers isn’t that much different from putting them all on the same trigger. I use four keys or pads instead of one, and integrate a CV foot pedal or two. I do NOT have a nice MIDI drum set though. I’ve got to use the pads and keys at hand. They aren’t sensitive enough for 24 velocity layers.

Yes, I’m aware that velocity can be edited in post, but I’m also aware that MIDI notes and crossfading layers can be edited in post. In post, or with ‘step entry’ style composing there’s not that much difference. When trying to play things in live, with cheap pads and keyboards…with minimal latency, while also tracking along with other VSTi plugins, all in the same host…the patch design needs to be different. MPC engines like GA4 are aimed at this sort of user. We ‘rough in compositions’ first, and if it sounds like a machine gun…we load and do the ‘detail work’ later. We don’t have a pro drummer at hand…so we rough it in and polish later. It’s not nearly as demanding on system resources as trying to load an instrument with gigs worth of samples (much of which probably won’t even be used during the session) and tens of thousands of potential triggers to track a ‘real time drumming performance’.

So I am curious of what happens if you load one of your super patches in Stand Alone mode and give the Halion engine access to all the cores. How much of your performance problems are due to the ‘host’ and the way it is managing resources vs the true ‘plugin potential’?

I’ve noticed that quite a few people are confused by the performance meters in Cubase and Halion. Those are NOT true ‘cpu’ meters. They are more of an indicator of relative performance within a specific time-reference…where everything needs to get done in sync to strict clock, etc. When things aren’t tweaked properly, I can peg that stupid performance meter in Cubase when my CPU is darn near idle (I can always get it sounding good again too…sometimes at a cost of latency…but then again I have cheap and ancient hardware…from CPU and motherboard to sound interface…so it works really well for what little I have invested in hardware here).

No doubt GA4 isn’t meant to go that far. Maybe it will be someday…

You’re correct that there is always room for improvement, and Halion does have a rather slow development cycle. The problem inspiring me to post here are claims that it doesn’t work, that it’s inefficient, or that it’s a waste of money, etc. None of that is true.

Third party libraries are an issue for some people, and that’s understandable. I didn’t get into Halion until version 5, and I KNEW it didn’t have many libraries for it. I wanted it to make surround sound stuff on the fly using unlimited numbers of DAW tracks to do multi channel samples at once…to integrate with Cubase and have FULL VST3 Expression support. At the time…nothing else on the market could do that, AND it was half the price of anything else on the market with as many features and synth engines.

I still contest the CPU/Resource efficiency thing. If there is anything heads above and better than Halion in this respect, with an equal or greater complexity and feature set, then it’s definitely in a much higher price bracket. I won’t argue that you might not find a more efficient ‘granular synth’ plugin…but how much does it cost? At some point it may well be more immediate (than waiting for future generations of software) AND less expensive to simply ‘use what we have’, and get one of the door stop PC’s out of the closet, and host some instruments on extra hardware? Ironically, hardware is cheaper than software these days…in fact, I’ve scoured enough stuff from people’s ‘garbage bins’ to make some decent pieces of music kit.

I think at least half of the issues some people experience with resource management are in the HOST, as there is a finite amount of time for plugins to get things done ‘in sync’ (between the clock ticks). Faster individual cores can help some with this, but in the digital realm, there will always be a finite amount of time…which is relative to the buffer size to your audio interface. At some point I hope more hosts will allow us to open a parallel matrix so we can get better use from multiple cores…but so far, none of the hosts in the consumer price range are doing that yet. So, essentially all the plugins are at the mercy of the host to a rather large degree.

On a PC as old and slow as mine…when I reach that ceiling with Cubase, I still have more than 40% of my CPU power free, so I can start moving VSTi plugins (where clock sync to the second with the rest of the DAW isn’t important) to a discrete Bidule and get several more instances going by using another 20% of the CPU.

If someone is on a budget and is looking for a well rounded set of sound scape tools with some of the best base content on the market, along with cutting edge psycho acoustic technologies, Halion packs a heck of a lot in the box for a fair price. I too wish Halion got ‘more love’ from Steinberg…but when I look around at alternative products, I see that the ‘love’ does come with a ‘price’ (and a lot of the ‘love’ projected by competing products is mostly sales hype and hot air…ultimately ‘paid for’ by the consumers).

Halion in its current state is more like an expandable Rompler. It is one heck of a nice bread and butter foundation for a workstation. One can make really nice projects, for all generas of music without having to buy a single ‘third party’ library. I wish I’d gotten Halion 4 back when I started moving over from racks and stacks to a software based DAW. I wouldn’t have needed at least three of the third party libraries I had purchased before H5 (Halion’s base content is better).

Having typed all this…I’ll be on my way from this thread. I apologize for approaching ‘rudeness’ in some previous posts. I don’t mean to be so impolite as to hijack a thread. I’m just dumbfounded at all the people who buy things without running the trials first, then claim it ‘doesn’t work’ and is a ‘waste of money’; or, folks who compare $200 options to $4,000 options; etc.

I am slightly curious about what H6 is about.

Any place to get any hints on this? Not that I’m really ready to update H5 yet.
It would be nice to see more realistic guitars and bass with more dynamics and perhaps articulation support.

BTW I am on an old 2008 Mac Pro on it’s last breath, and I have never had one issue with regards to CPU usage. To the contrary, on a full Cubase project, Halion is at it’s bast when it lets me fit in 3-4 extra instrument patches whereas, I would have never been able to load a few more VSTi. In a lot of cases I don’t know what I’d do without it.

H5 “sample” content is by no means heavy… Its the SYNTH ENGINE in GRAIN or Synth mode that kills it… Specially with synths that have 8 OSC multiplied effects and so on.

Specially with combo patches that have 3 or 4 synths running at once per patch. Like the default preset that loads up. It has 3 Synths running and each has a ton of things going on.

Apart from that, it bugs a lot when doing programming.
WHICH is the main point of HALion. Its a Sampler… Just very insignificant commands in HALion have cause crashes and makes no sense to me.I don’t want it to crash when I’m programming for the last 30min. and a simple drag and drop would make it freeze or the annoying splash that an error has …blabla… etc… :frowning:

The sample content is very poor, Synths are great but very heavy.
Audio quality of HALion is the best out there.
ALL reported bugs need fixing, like last year… :slight_smile:

cheers! Lets see what H6 is gonna look like because the H5 UI is …mmmmhhh! not very friendly for programming unless you have 3 monitors or a 2k or 4k monitor. I can live with that… I just want it to be serviced with the long list of bugs.

I do understand that sluggish feeling when you stack a lot patches in Halion. I try to stick to Padshop for granular, and use other synths initially, afterwards, using Halion as a supplement. So yeah my perspective is different. The main reason I wanted H5 was to be able to load my HSO libraries with articulations intact, and I have to say, that works nicely.

I have been weary of making fast moves in software when I know I’m ‘power using’ it. I actually have an innate habit of saving every time I load Halion or make a big move, save prior to certain other functions in Cubase, for that matter most pro software.

I suppose if Halion is providing the power to do these things, it should be able to handle whats available. It’s true that with the feature requests in the FR section, I had an expectation that these were requests for H5 and not a list of things we would like to pay for in the next version. With so many great competitive offerings out there, I will have to decide whether it’s worth it to push too far into Halion - the more you upgrade, the more you feel obligated to honor your investment into the platform.

Hi all,

I can confirm that there will be a final maintenance update for HALion 5 soon after the release of HALion 6.

Anyone of you guys know where to place a 3. party contents for HALion 5? The manual from the developer places it in Library/Audio/Presets/SteinbergMadiaTech…/HALion 5

However there is no folder on my computer with that name. Creating one and placing the content there does not help.

I have tried to place the contents in all the 27.677.456 folders I have on my computer, but alas no luck. Each time I placed it in any of the 27.677.456 folders I hit the 6.534 buttons in the HALion GUI/Media bay/File system to see if it worked, but alas no luck. This took me a little over 350 years to do so I am a little frustrated as my kids, grandchildren and even their children have now grown old and died and I never got to see them as I spent all my time trying to figure this out.

I do not have a bachelor degree in engineering that seems necessary for HALion. Perhaps Steinberg should include a “Master degree or PhD needed” sticker on front of the HALion box? I think it would be recommendable and save years of fumbling.

HALion 6 will be just another frustation I guess. Another 350 years of fumbling around, clicking buttons without getting the hang of it, A frustration that I need to pay 200USD to experience. But I am the biggest fool on earth so perhaps Steinberg will convince me buying it anyway through some flashy videos telling me how great life will be if we switch my hard earned cash with an upgrade.

Or perhaps I should stick to Kontakt, Zebra, Serum, Dune and Omnisphere? It only took me only a few months to learn them all. So well that I am now programming patches and instruments for them. Seems like there are more people with the same experience as the market is full of people developing for those, and none for HALion.

You are in the right folder, but in the wrong library. You need to go to the “user library”.

Open the finder, hold down the OPTION key and access the “Go” menu and then select “Library” to instantly jump to the Users ~/Library directory

We have carefully reviewed the whole content creation process for the development of HALion 6 in order to make it easier and more convenient to create, share and exchange user generated content. This is one of the big topics for the next version.

You’ve just described a three step issue. It IS in the manual, and plenty threads here on the forum address this same question.

  1. Put the samples, presets, and VSTsound files into any directory/folder you like. If you got some content that suggests a specific directory you many optionally use that (even if you must create it). If you use the authors recommended directory then there is less chance that Halion will need to ask you questions later about where content is located.

  2. In Halion, or in Cubase, with the Media Bay/Browser, open the system directory tree and put a check mark by the directory(ies) that hold your user content. Click the rescan icon (or just wait a while). If you’ve added content that is not in one of the directories already being auto scanned by Halion, then you’ll need to tell it about the new directory (Just like EVERY other VSTi on the market that allows user content).

The reason it works this way (through a relational database) is so you can have a robustly searchable and pre-viewable library, where everything is tagged and categorized…even if the raw samples do not support embedded meta data protocols. It also lets you keep libraries in as many directories and drives as you like.

Media Bay is a power user relational database. It makes it much easier to maintain massive libraries…all tagged and sorted so you can find stuff. You can ‘click’ it and preview things without having to manually walk through dozens of steps to load up a plug in and audition it.

Note:
If the user content was distributed with separate presets and raw samples (as opposed to archiving them in a VSTsound container), and you installed it to a different directory than the initial creator was using; then, Halion might ask for the location of the samples again the first time you run it. It’s a simple matter of directing Halion to look in the proper director(ies) for the missing samples.

If you ever move some of the content to a new directory or device, the next time you start Halion it will inform you that something is missing, and will allow you to redirect it to the new location.

Which defeats the purpose of H5 or HALion in general… We don’t get the necessary updates to addressed reported bugs and now we gonna jump to H6 while H5 was never taken care of.
Nothing has changed Matthias… same moves for 15 years on this product (and others).
We needed those fixes last year. We gonna jump on H6 and nothing was done to H5 in its lifetime. Same will be for H6… “HEY H7 is here… yeah we didn’t want to fix H6 but hey here is a new one. It’s better.!!” It’s all to familiar since I’ve been on this sampler since it came out.

That whole mentality has to change.
People pay a lot of money for a product and its never at 100%

I can’t sit for a good 30min or 45min. to make a decent tutorial of HALion when It crashes while editing. ALWAYS! SO I give up and just use my old libraries and lose all inspiration to create new content or do tutorials. HATE to be telling people to buy this product and then I have to be their tech guy because I feel responsible for telling them to buy it. I want HALion to be on the top… not where it is now.

Not quite so. Omnisphere installs by clicking the installation file. It places presets and tables in the correct folders automatically. Omnisphere has the same kind of browser information as HALion only more thought through. It even tops the information by adding graphics (sometimes the graphics tell a story too) and/or much information on the source of the patch. Where HALion is overwhelmingly complicated, with a lot of completely unnecessary buttons, Omnis is simpler and faster to use. Steinbergs Mediabay is something that some like and some dislike. I dislike it. I have been working with relationship databases since 1993 and to my knowledge the Mediabay does not hold up to standards of a “great” GUI. It is a programmers GUI and not a user GUI. A “great” user GUI you can find in Omnisphere.

And btw, the procedure you described for installing 3. party stuff in HALion, did not work with the presets in question.

++Bump

… writing as a long time user (and software developer), it seems that the business model is market-driven (and not product driven {as to be honest Steinberg once were} sell, up-sell, cross-sell , release new version (and involve the users community to participate as alpha/beta testers), and then, get all ‘GlossWare’ with more marketing and inferences of what we need and what the new version will deliver.

(Q) what are the other “big topics” for next version : now|wow that we have been hinted that a “more convenient” patch browser will be available

Where is the innovation, the product leadership,
I hope to see the ‘technology ball’ picked up again, and you run with it.

… as you can see by my ‘hope’, I like most of your users out there want you to succeed,
and maybe Steinberg is just relying too much on our loyalty over the last 10 years or more,
because, seriously - you are letting us long time users down.

What’s the logic or reasoning behind that?

We don’t want the users to update to HALion 6 because of bug fixes, but because of the new features and improvements. All bug fixes that were done during the development of HALion 6 will also be available for HALion 5 customers within the final maintenance update.

Thank you for explaining the reasoning!

IF they give us the MACRO page with editor like I have asked since 4 came out, filling up the surveys and what not, and have it running rock solid, (AS IT SHOULD) you can rest assure that HALion would be on the top of any sampler right now. We have very little companies doing libraries or anything to be a competition for Kontakt. Right now we are a joke to them. “HALion? ehg!”

I’m not the CEO nor the owner of Steinberg and I’m more embarrassed than they are.
I have more pride and determination to see Steinberg kick some competition’s butt.
But I can’t promote HALion in the current state. I can’t create content if it would crash on me with a simple Drag and drop.

Matthias Quellmann! If you hold on the update past the release of H6, you are forcing people to jump to H6 and then there is no reason to be on H5.
I don’t think they see the point that its not a good practice to play around with their customers like that…The H5 update is embarrassingly delayed. FEB 2015 till now late, post H6 late. :frowning:

I hope they can read the passion and frustration in my words and not that I’m trying to bash.

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: AppHangB1
Application Name: HALion 5.exe
Application Version: 2.2.7.106
Application Timestamp: 54b8eef4
Hang Signature: 2b1e
Hang Type: 2048
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Hang Signature 1: 2b1e4108ba6ebf1eb5788b9bc3be390b
Additional Hang Signature 2: 3191
Additional Hang Signature 3: 3191064041925227a78bca9a96123de4
Additional Hang Signature 4: 2b1e
Additional Hang Signature 5: 2b1e4108ba6ebf1eb5788b9bc3be390b
Additional Hang Signature 6: 3191
Additional Hang Signature 7: 3191064041925227a78bca9a96123de4


All the time… just tried to load a patch and it can’t find the sample for whatever the heck reason and I can’t stop the search. it freezes. Can’t even capture the screen…

Hi Salvador,

I can assure you that we not holding back anything and we are definitely not playing with our customers. The H5 maintenance update will be available close to the release of H6, so that all of the fixes of the H6 development can be implemented in the H5 update. There is a team of quality assurance engineers constantly working on HALion and the other instruments. Before every release there are months of beta testing to make sure that the software works as expected. Of course there can always be bugs (we are talking about software with thousands of lines of code…), but we would never release a version knowing that there are crash bugs. As I mentioned before there is a whole team at Steinberg that has created HALion 4 from scratch. Since The Grand 3 and HALion Sonic 1 all of the VST instrument have been developed by this team and we are very passionate about our work.

So please, let’s work together on this one. I will send you a PM with my email and it would be great if you could send me the crash log so we can have a look at it.

Logs Sent…!

Just to balance out perspectives here (and companies like Steinberg do listen to and consider many different perspective).

One of my favorite things about Halion is that “I” get to design the UI. I don’t have to conform to someone else’s cheesy work flow ideas. It’s a power user’s dream, in that I can design a UI that spreads across three monitors and shows tons of information in a single window, or I can make a very simple single instrument 600x400 UI that only shows the ‘tactile’ basics. I can make it ‘visually’ appealing with lots of pretty graphics, or I can make it look like a power user’s binary data tank. I can split, drag, pop-out windows and frames and make it MY UI.

I’ve no problem seeing waveforms and such in the Cubase/Halion Media Browser. While icons and such would indeed be nice for some users to have in the relational database (and not that difficult to add at some point), I’d personally elect NOT to use those features for my own projects if given the choice. I’d rather not have a 4meg bitmap image taking up space on my relatively expensive SSD media when text gets the job done just as well (and is fully searchable). I’d rather NOT have a window or dialog take up massive amounts of screen real estate (I use three screens, and it’s still not enough). I’m seriously buggered by the ‘progressive RACE’ to make things so ‘user friendly’ that we can’t just hit a key combo and type in three letters to find what we need anymore. I’d much rather spend an afternoon reading a manual than many minutes every single day scrolling windows that take up too much screen real estate looking for ‘image based visual cues’. I’ve no problem with a db that ‘supports’ tagging with images and icons…but if it’s forced on me, and if I lose power searching functions and ‘documentation’ in the process…I’ll be pretty upset.

Case in point…Opera Browser with Prestige and earlier engines was a total JOY to use. Not only was it the leanest and fastest browser out there…it had all the best POWER USER features in one simple installation, under ONE user agreement/contract. Now it’s a one tab, third party ‘plugin’ nightmare that needs far more resources to install and use, is arguably less secure, and ‘relies’ on third party ‘plugins’ to get a single ‘power user’ ability. Push-centric…app-store…crap. I hope Halion doesn’t attempt to do the same sort of ‘user/consumer’ friendly thing. I want Steinberg’s tools to be a PRODUCER of content…not so much to be a ‘consumer’.

I’ve had ‘third party libraries’ for various products, including Kontakt, ARIA, etc…which can be a pain in the rear to install and get working. The ‘library’ wasn’t built correctly or was poorly documented, etc. It wasn’t the fault of NI, or Plogue that someone put a garbage library out, and was too lazy to make and test an installer for it.

I’m far from a ‘programmer’, and my so called IQ and ‘education level’ is actually on record as being ‘quite low’, but I have no problem making an installer for Halion content that extracts things to a sub directory of one of the default directories holding factory Halion content. I can even make it put the content on any ‘removable’ device I want and implement plug and play scripts that’ll drop file-system links into these default directories ‘as needed’. It’s really not that difficult to do with free multi-platform installer tools.

If I were going to sell or otherwise mass distribute a library for Halion 5, I’d take the time to get advice here on the forums, and also contact the Halion Dev team (providing samples of my Library) to see how they recommend packaging and distributing it so end users will not face the installation problem you’ve described. It’s really not that hard to get the information and support required.

There’s a point where I’d rather not pay a premium for ‘rebadged tools’ (such as basic archivers and extractors) we’ve all bought, paid for, and had at our disposal for decades. If Steinberg decides to either develop and service their own, or pay the royalties to rebadge and bundle some other company’s installer tools, then the total cost of the product goes up (even for users who have no intention of packaging and selling their libraries). The more of that kind of stuff a sound engine developer packs into a product, the more resources they must dedicate to supporting and maintaining them…across all of the wild and wacky ‘OS related’ standard changes that seem to come every few months from the likes of Microsoft and Apple.

I believe that Halion 6 is highly likely to include more of the power tools that third party content developers have been asking for. Perhaps it’s been a ‘long time coming’, but it’s not due to a lack of effort and dedication from the “Halion Team”. I’m eager to see what direction it all goes. It’ll be interesting to see how they manage the pressure to copy cat the dumbed down ‘consumer driven’, subscription based rapid prototyping and app-store models, vs keeping a solid focus on providing power user ‘production tools’ for ‘producers’ to ‘create with’.

I’m cool with user friendly. I just don’t want to lose, ‘user choice’, and ‘power’. I’m also getting frustrated with being forced to pay multiple times over for technologies we’ve already paid for and mastered many times over as general personal computer users (such as reading a REAL product manual, then making a simple self extracting archive/installer with a few user options on launch). I get pretty tired of paying twice as much for a bundle of tools we’ve already got, or running into brick walls in apps that point us to ‘third party app stores’ demanding ‘cloud based subscriptions’ to get anything done.

This is good to hear and very appreciated.