Out now: HALion 6 and HALion Sonic 3

Oh come on…
We write music all the time and treat our PC and software as a musical instrument. We know we have to upgrade, but not when our existing instrument(s) are working perfectly. Yep 64bit was needed for the extra sample memory but W764 is totally capable (and stable) as a music production tool -and a lot of musicians are still using it. If H6 does not become W7 friendly, then I’m sorry to say that there are other alternatives that will look after musicians who don’t want to just jump on an upgrade of everything thing - 'cause they have musical work to do (rant over) :slight_smile:

for those with win 7 and thinking to buy halion …
see attachment. :smiley:

Everything works fine. It’s just that they made a BU-decision not to support win 7 (that’s the support center they are talking about) for any reason, and even the day from the release they see the reactions and they say they are looking in to it to maybe change that policy

That’s pretty nice imho.

So:
Halion works fine on an a 6 year old x220 with an i5. It’s not heavier on cpu load neither it seems at first sight.
And this is something very nice.
Also the installer went perfectly, both on win 7 and win 10.
No problem at all for me at least.

kind regards,
R

I would like to add my support for Windows 7 being supported.

I appreciate some people feel that we should ALL throw away perfectly good systems to jump on the latest and greatest, but if a system is designed specifically and only as a DAW workstation, works without a crash, why should we spend considerable amounts of time installing a new O/S which is also bloated with extra apps/services that we don’t want, need or require and can cause unneccessary conflicts.

Some may reply that we therefore shouldn’t jump on the latest version of Halion, (probably not Steinberg’s ideal scenario!!!) but it does offer extra functionality that 5 doesn’t, so there seems some justification.

Jumping on Windows 10 offers very little for a standalone DAW. Disconnected from the internet etc., even the security argument is not so pertinent. :slight_smile:

So it’s not that it can’t be installed on Win 7, it’s just that Steinberg doesn’t want to cover support for it on Win 7 at the moment? It works like normal?

I have HalionSonic 2 and was considering getting 3 (well, actually I was considering Halion 6 until I saw what the upgrade price for that was…), but I run Win 7 x64. I’m not going to another OS until I get a new computer, and the one I have currently is working perfect for my needs still.

I even heard some people still use MIDI. It’s 2017 and not 1983.

I still use Windows 7 because my £4000+ audio interfaces do not support Windows 10, Windows 10 has issues with Firewire, so that would be £1000’s of Powercore broken, and if I update the OS, all the software and plug ins will need to be reinstalled, and some challenge/response codes are very likely to no longer work.
I have Windows 10 on one PC here, and it is absolutely horrid, hardly anything works with it properly, and I cannot see not a single thing that is better about Windows 10 - it doesn’t receive emails properly, the web browser is not compatible with many web sites, it is slower and it spends most of it’s time communicating what you are doing back to Microsoft, you cannot turn auto updates off, so if it decides it needs to do an update and reboot in the middle of your work - it will do it.
Windows 7 is perfect - a working studio will never change something that works - every other piece of(music) software works with Windows 7 including Cubase, Wavelab, Dorico etc…
Windows 7 was the preferred OS just over a years ago (because Windows 8 was accepted as bad), so a new PC just over a year ago was likely to be running Windows 7 - it is not an old OS

I completely agree with you, for similar reasons.

I know I will have to move on from W7 at some point in the future, but am not sure that W10 will be the way to go for the reasons you mention.

Hopefully not in 2 weeks or more.
If there is no QA process for W7, i will stay on HAL 5, and take a deeper look to other samplers.

I’ve expected that, but…thats not the point.

The point is: If there is a problem with HAL 6 on Win 7 64 Bit, then you have no support because Win 7 doesn’t fullfil the system requirements.
Any new update will just check on Win 8 and Win 10, there is no guarantee that it should work on Win 7.

Mac user here, so no W7 input. That said, very impressed with the H6 upgrade from H5. Sternberg clearly put in a lot of effort into this. Between the incorporated scripting and macro environment, the new instruments, ease of install, etc., great job. It’s certainly a large (size) upgrade, but the Download Assistant worked well and relatively fast. I manually moved the sound files to an external drive and replaced with alias files (which took some time). Really a more significant release than I expected. Clearly H6 is a capable competitor with the other sampling products. Will be interesting to see what content get’s released for H6, over time. Good job Sternberg team!

What do you mean by ‘replaced with alias files’?

Hi,
I´m win7 64bit, bought HS3 upgrade from HS2,
installation and activation went fine,
when I try to open HS3, cubase (6.5) crashes every time.
Please update for win7.
Kind Regards

It’s a no brainer, HALion 6 must have decent WIN 7 support!

My WIN 7 DAW with Cubase 9 works beatifully and is as solid as a rock, the best system I have ever had. Please don’t loose touch with the musician’s usability. I need my system to work as it does for a few years yet without ‘technical issues’ getting in the way. I understand eventually I will move to WIN10, but I also understand most people using a PC with Cubase/Halion currently use WIN 7.

++1 exactly as above.

I will not upgrade my H5 license until WIN7 is on the supported OS list from Steinberg

My Steinberg is down cant authorise my H6, seems to have been like this for a while, any info ?

If you take an installed HALion 6 .vstsound file and move it to another drive, then point to that newly located .vstsound file with an Alias file in the original location, the HALion 6 will use the Alias file as a pointer to the actual sound file. On a Mac, the sound files are stored in the Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content/ folder – and in the case of HALion 6, (many) new sound files are written into the HALion and VST Content sub folders there. Just a way to free-up space on the system hard drive, given the large size of the HALion 6 sound files. I haven’t used the HALion Library Manager app yet, so it may in effect do the same thing (perhaps easier than the manual process).

Thanks for that explanation, but where do the ‘alias’ files come from? How are they created?

In OS X on the Mac, right-click on the moved .vstsound file(s) you want to make Alias’ for, and select “Make Alias” from the drop-down list in the menu. An alias file will be created with the same name and “.alias” added to the end of the filename. In the case of .vstsound files, it will end up being a .vstsound.alias extension on the file. Just delete the .alias portion (so that the alias is exactly the same name as the .vstsound file(s) in the original folder), and your good. I believe in the Windows/PC world, the equivalent would be called a Shortcut, with the same process applied.

If you Hold Command and drag the original sample files to a folder on the alternate drive, it will move instead of copy them.
Then if you hold Command and Alt/option and drag them all back to the original folder, it will create Aliases of those files without the .Alias on the end of each file.
You may find this technique handy and less work.

Hope his helps.

Rick