HALion 7

[enCiphered]

When enCiphered said “global unison” I think he/she was referring to the unison in the voice control module of the zone?
Is there a program level unison? I’ve not discovered this yet.

Yes, I meant unison in the voice conrol module

[IvyBirds]

You’re welcome. Hmmm… the voice control unison is polyphonic for me. Wonder why it’s not for you…

I’m new to Halion by the way, got much to learn, so struggling to suggest a reason for this.

HALion's main paradigm is to create layered multi-timbre patches, when you think about it, it's much easier to have a central control for all of them

That way you can quickly lump a bunch of layers together from existing presets and play them all in unison or legato or whatever without having to go into each layer and changing everything

[Satch1]

Thank you, guys! I think I’ve found the issue, but I’m still not completely sure if this is the right approach. My mistake was using the unison in the voice control module at the top instead of the unison option within the spectral engine. When I use global unison, it becomes monophonic, but with the spectral engine’s unison mode, I can play polyphonically. Hope that makes sense!

That's most likely to stop potential overloads.

If you have multiple layers under the program level and they all go to unison I could see that crapping out pretty easily.

It also seems to be engine dependent. So you might see correct behaviour at the program level if your layers are using VA or wavetable.

There was another thread here where legato wasn't working correctly on the program level but would work on the layer/zone level.

Just a little peculiarity of the hierarchical system in Halion.

It's just a good rule of thumb to do these kind of things on the engine/layer level and ignore the program level voice controls.

When enCiphered said “global unison” I think he/she was referring to the unison in the voice control module of the zone?
Is there a program level unison? I’ve not discovered this yet.

I now better understand the hierarchical system in Halion, so I understand your post better now too. It all depends on what level of the hierarchy you select in the program tree. If one wants to edit all Zones in all layers of a program simultaneously one would select the program level at the top of the tree and change zone unison, or whatever you want, and all zones in all layers would follow. Then there's the layer level to edit all zones within that particular layer, and then the zone level for editing individual zones.
Really threw me that for a while, but now it makes sense to me and is really rather useful.

Still not sure what's going on for enCiphered though. Polyphonic zone unison is still working for me, even using spectral engine.

[Satch1]

You’re welcome. Hmmm… the voice control unison is polyphonic for me. Wonder why it’s not for you…

I’m new to Halion by the way, got much to learn, so struggling to suggest a reason for this.

HALion's main paradigm is to create layered multi-timbre patches, when you think about it, it's much easier to have a central control for all of them

That way you can quickly lump a bunch of layers together from existing presets and play them all in unison or legato or whatever without having to go into each layer and changing everything

Thank you. Yes I understand it better now (read previous post).

It's looking like a really powerful system. I'm excited to delve deeper.

[Satch1]

That's most likely to stop potential overloads.

If you have multiple layers under the program level and they all go to unison I could see that crapping out pretty easily.

It's just a good rule of thumb to do these kind of things on the engine/layer level and ignore the program level voice controls.

I can definitely confirm that my CPU goes berserk if I leave all the performance parameters as they are in the options tab. By default, it’s set to 128 Max Voices and 90 Max CPU, and even for something as simple as sculpting a pad or texture with just one note in the spectral engine, I’ve had to dial the voices down to a max of 32 or lower, and bring the CPU limit down to 10%. It’s crazy! So, yeah, that might explain why I can’t use polyphony when I enable unison in the voices group.
Of course, I use the Blur effect but even without it, the CPU gets overloaded pretty quickly.
And I don’t have any multilayers, just a short sample loaded in the spectral engine.

Yeah it certainly can be very CPU intensive can't it. I was excited to find the option to turn multicore processing on, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to help at all.

[Satch1]

I've found a bug that freezes the UI. Sound still plays though.

If I go into the files browser to load a sample and preview one, then move the left side border of the browser it freezes the UI and I need to reload the plugin, or DAW, depending on which DAW I'm using.

Can anybody confirm this please? I'm on Windows 10, and it happens in standalone too.

[enCiphered]

I've found a bug that freezes the UI. Sound still plays though.

If I go into the files browser to load a sample and preview one, then move the left side border of the browser it freezes the UI and I need to reload the plugin, or DAW, depending on which DAW I'm using.

Can anybody confirm this please? I'm on Windows 10, and it happens in standalone too.

I just tested this in Bitwig Studio on Windows 11 and couldn't replicate the issue. The UI didn’t freeze, checked it several times with all borders. Everything worked smoothly both in the plugin and standalone mode.

[IvyBirds]

Yeah it certainly can be very CPU intensive can't it. I was excited to find the option to turn multicore processing on, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to help at all.

If you have any extra computers laying around HALion7 works great with AudioGridder
https://audiogridder.com/

AudioGridder is free

You install Audiogridder Server on the other computer and Audiogridder client on your main computer and make sure the two are connected via Ethernet/Lan the faster the better

Then in your DAW you launch Audio Gridder as your plugin it will then connect to the Audiogridder server on the other PC and in the plugin you launch HALion7 on the other computer. AudioGridder then sends MIDI and Audio back and forth l. It also send the graphics from the other plugin over the wire. There is a tiny bit of latency if you are tweaking sound design over the network, so I do all the sound design stuff on the main PC and export everything from HALion as a new preset and then load that on the server side

https://www.steinberg.help/r/halion/7.0 ... les_t.html

AudioGridder will then handle all of the DSP processing for that HALion7 patch on the other computer so it's not bogging down your main PC. AudioGridder server is very light weight on system resources and you can use to host multiple plugins on the server side and off your main PC. If you do that the software will put each plugin on a different core for maximum efficiency

It's amazing, I currently have 4 computers on my network. It's a great way to bring new life to old computers. Especially as all the secondary computers are doing is running the plugins, they are not having to worry about all the over head of the DAW and running the plugins. You also can mix and match Macs and PCs, so if you are running logic on a Mac as your main PC you can run a Windows Machine as your server and run Windows only plugins

[Satch1]

I've found a bug that freezes the UI. Sound still plays though.

If I go into the files browser to load a sample and preview one, then move the left side border of the browser it freezes the UI and I need to reload the plugin, or DAW, depending on which DAW I'm using.

Can anybody confirm this please? I'm on Windows 10, and it happens in standalone too.

I just tested this in Bitwig Studio on Windows 11 and couldn't replicate the issue. The UI didn’t freeze, checked it several times with all borders. Everything worked smoothly both in the plugin and standalone mode.

Okay, thanks very much for checking. Did you preview a sample? Everything works fine here until I preview a sample. Weird.

EDIT: If I make sure to back out of the sample folder I was in, or switch to the program tree view, before moving the border then it will not freeze. I can live with that. I'll wait a bit to see if anyone else can replicate this issue, or I can solve it, before reporting to Steinberg.

[Satch1]

Yeah it certainly can be very CPU intensive can't it. I was excited to find the option to turn multicore processing on, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to help at all.

If you have any extra computers laying around HALion7 works great with AudioGridder
https://audiogridder.com/

AudioGridder is free

You install Audiogridder Server on the other computer and Audiogridder client on your main computer and make sure the two are connected via Ethernet/Lan the faster the better

Then in your DAW you launch Audio Gridder as your plugin it will then connect to the Audiogridder server on the other PC and in the plugin you launch HALion7 on the other computer. AudioGridder then sends MIDI and Audio back and forth l. It also send the graphics from the other plugin over the wire. There is a tiny bit of latency if you are tweaking sound design over the network, so I do all the sound design stuff on the main PC and export everything from HALion as a new preset and then load that on the server side

https://www.steinberg.help/r/halion/7.0 ... les_t.html

AudioGridder will then handle all of the DSP processing for that HALion7 patch on the other computer so it's not bogging down your main PC. AudioGridder server is very light weight on system resources and you can use to host multiple plugins on the server side and off your main PC. If you do that the software will put each plugin on a different core for maximum efficiency

It's amazing, I currently have 4 computers on my network. It's a great way to bring new life to old computers. Especially as all the secondary computers are doing is running the plugins, they are not having to worry about all the over head of the DAW and running the plugins. You also can mix and match Macs and PCs, so if you are running logic on a Mac as your main PC you can run a Windows Machine as your server and run Windows only plugins

Thanks for the info pal. That sounds awesome. The only other system I have is a 2008 quad core pc running win XP. Not sure that'd be suitable for the job.

[IvyBirds]

Thanks for the info pal. That sounds awesome. The only other system I have is a 2008 quad core pc running win XP. Not sure that'd be suitable for the job.

No problem, if you ever get a new computer save the old one and try it. I am using my old studio PC and a few old laptops

[Satch1]

Thanks for the info pal. That sounds awesome. The only other system I have is a 2008 quad core pc running win XP. Not sure that'd be suitable for the job.

No problem, if you ever get a new computer save the old one and try it. I am using my old studio PC and a few old laptops

I'll definitely keep that in mind and give it a go when I get a new computer

[twal]

Hello, was wondering if Absolute 6 can be ran from an external HD reliably. I know some users have their Omnisphere running from their external drive. Wondering how it is for Absolute if anyone has used it like this, thanks.

[Gamma-UT]

You use Library Manager to move the Halion/GA5 .vstsound sample files to an external drive - it's easier than it used to be.

[IvyBirds]

Hello, was wondering if Absolute 6 can be ran from an external HD reliably. I know some users have their Omnisphere running from their external drive. Wondering how it is for Absolute if anyone has used it like this, thanks.

I run mine from an external drive, it's SSD and connects via USB C

I installed it to that drive from the beginning