New day… same ol’ question/rant.
Is there an H5 demo yet?
I am a failed romantic. I loved H3, but abandoned it in favour of Kontakt.
I would get H5 in a heartbeat if I could test the importability of my old material.
As much as I appreciate all the new features, frankly without really good import, it becomes little more than an Omnisphere to me. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad thing, but Omnisphere is pretty much a self-contained world. A big world, but a walled garden. And that’s how H4… and now H5 seem to me.
I understand that every vendor wants to have their own walled garden of content… they don’t -want- users to be able to re-purpose their content x-platform.
I always like H3… much preferred to Kontakt. But Kontakt had/has all the cool content. If I can’t import from my old material I’ll never move back.
I can only say of coarse giving a conservative estimate, that Halion 5 is at least 50 million times better than Kontakt 5 when it comes to overall sound design capabilities, modulation routing, output routing, preset management ease of use and a trillion other things in my opinion. This is from a guy who loves Native Instruments stuff, so I have no vendetta against Kontakt 5 at all. Can Halion 5 import the whole universe? No. But I use Kontakt to import what Halion can’t. Then Halion can import whatever nki’s you wish to port over to Halion. Just buy it without waiting for the demo. You’ll probably be dust in the ground before they release the Halion 5 demo. Then you would have lost out on all the fun you could have had with Halion 5. What a shame! 
.-.
Hi Suntower,
You will have to wait a little longer for the demo of Halion 5.
I can not share a release date of the demo with you but I can share the information that the demo will come soon 
.
cheers,
Jan
@Jan – thanks. Look forward to it.
@Orbit-50 – I’m sure it is -much- better. I still prefer the interface of Hal3 (mostly) to Kontakt and have a ton of custom content in that format. However… 2 pet peeves of mine:
a) Backward compatibility. I -really- resent how blithely many vendors (including SB) treat this topic. I simply don’t wish to support a product that can’t properly read its own file format from 2008.
b) As a former ‘software dev’ I learned a long time ago that you can only really master so many tools. You can either use programs like Hal, Omnisphere, Kontakt, as big ‘sound chests’… or… you can really work to get inside them. I just don’t have the bandwidth for another ‘sound design program’ right now… If it properly imports the content, then it’s worth it to leverage what I already have. If not? No time for all that. Thanks.