Falcon, HALion, or Kontakt – which is best for sampled synthesizer sounds?

[Hyperbole]

I use Falcon 3, HALion 7, and Kontakt 8 regularly, but for different reasons:

• Falcon as a basic playback engine for the ten or so UVI libraries I own (both synthetic and orchestral)

• HALion 7 for its wide-ranging, decent-sounding factory "ROMpler" library (instead of a Motif or Fantom or something like that in hardware) and increasingly for sound design

• Kontakt 8 as a playback engine for my Komplete Ultimate and various third-party libraries of mostly sampled acoustic/orchestral instruments. I have also used Kontakt extensively for the past 20 years as a "synthesizer" to play back the gigabytes upon gigabytes of deeply-sampled custom synth sounds that I further tweak using Kontakt's synthesis features and decent-sounding FX

I have never really liked working in Kontakt and prefer HALion these days. Since all of my custom synth libraries started out in Logic's EXS (especially since the Redmatica "Autosampler" utility was added to Logic,) I can use HALion to directly load EXS patches.

However, Falcon 3 seems to have perhaps better-sounding filters (and a wider variety of them) and FX, and is arguably more flexible in terms of synthesis features. While "hate" is much too strong, I am NOT a fan of Falcon's UI. It seems needlessly cumbersome and over-engineered to me. But maybe I need to spend more time really digging in. I'm trying to avoid making another mistake by "betting on the wrong horse," which I feel I did by adopting Kontakt as my primary sampling platform, one which I don't believe has a promising future under NI's new ownership.

[dune_rave]

I've tried/have all 3.
Kontakt : i don't like that NI do not improve it , just adding stupid updates. The factory library is weak, i have 3_4 third party library i can use.

Halion: the gui is just bad, and it was constantly checking validation online. And the way steinberg manages this instrument is a bit worse than how NI handle Kontakt.
I only tried the "not full" version, but later stopped using.

Falcon: got this monster at last black friday.
Imho for such complex thing, the gui cannot be much better.
Its the best from these three plugins, but cant be compared to kontakt because its totally different.

I would also mention omnisphere, this one is even better.

Another mention for Avenger2. This one has superb EDM oriented sounds.

[IvyBirds]

Halion: the gui is just bad,

Then change it. HALion7 has the most customizable GUI of any plugin that is deep that I am aware and it's something that non programers can easily do. With others you have to know various scripting languages, with HALion7 you just need to drag, drop, and click

[IvyBirds]

I am NOT a fan of Falcon's UI. It seems needlessly cumbersome and over-engineered to me. But maybe I need to spend more time really digging in. I'm trying to avoid making another mistake by "betting on the wrong horse," which I feel I did by adopting Kontakt as my primary sampling platform, one which I don't believe has a promising future under NI's new ownership.

I am most certainly not a fan of Falcon's UI either. For me it's just at this point a preset player and even then I end up sampling it and bringing it into HALion7

I also don't think you bet on the wrong horse with Kontact. There was a time (to put it into equestrian terms) when it was the Kentucky Derby winning horse, but that horse has now sadly been put out to pasture and there are now different better horses to bet on

I like HALion7 because it's a sampling workstation and I basically view it as a modern day Synclavier. In the early and mid 1980s with Synclavier you used a main frame computer to do amazing things with both samples and FM Synthesis.

With HALion7 I get a phenomenal Sampling workstation that can actually make samples or import WAV files, I can use them as a sampler, use them with granular, turn them into a Wavetable, or resynthesize them with the spectral synth.

I also have available an extremely powerful and deep FM synth which I love the crap out of

You also get a nice sounding VA, and you can layer all of those things together

On top of that you get a highly customizable UI that can be configured multiple ways to suit whatever you are trying to do

[Hyperbole]

I like HALion7 because it's a sampling workstation and I basically view it as a modern day Synclavier. In the early and mid 1980s with Synclavier you used a main frame computer to do amazing things with both samples and FM Synthesis.

With HALion7 I get a phenomenal Sampling workstation that can actually make samples or import WAV files, I can use them as a sampler, use them with granular, turn them into a Wavetable, or resynthesize them with the spectral synth.

I also have available an extremely powerful and deep FM synth which I love the crap out of

You also get a nice sounding VA, and you can layer all of those things together

On top of that you get a highly customizable UI that can be configured multiple ways to suit whatever you are trying to do

This pretty much sums up everything I like about HALion. It's an incredibly powerful modern sampling/synthesis system. Musicians in the 1980s would have felt like they had won the lottery and then gone to heaven for a system like this, especially considering that HALion 7 is $400 and a maxed-out Synclavier was close to $400,000.

I suppose something similar could be said about Falcon, although its FM synthesis features aren't as advanced as those in HALion 7. Regardless, there is something about Falcon's UI that bugs me (but not as much as Kontakt's). Of course, if I would just spent the time to learn Falcon inside and out, I'm sure its UI conventions would start to make more sense. It's not that complicated. But I feel the UI could be a lot better.

Of course, HALion is also bloated (although I'm not sure what I would remove,) and navigating its UI is unwieldy in many ways. But as you say, you can simplify the UI by removing tabs and panels and saving these more basic layouts (with the last one being remembered).

In the end, I can make Falcon and Kontakt work. But I would prefer to develop new custom sample-based sounds (that I might layer with other synthesis methods) in one tool so I am not bouncing back and forth between them. Then I would have my VSL and Spitfire orchestral libraries (with their own sampler engines,) Kontakt acoustic instrument libraries, a few UVI sampled instrument libraries, and HALion for all my custom stuff.