Does Halion 6 have a way to audition sounds without loading (like Komplete Kontrol)?
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Not that I have ever seen. It’s a feature we need pretty badly,
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If you use Cubase, then yes. Not sure how far back in terms of version, but I know the ability has been there since Cubase 7 for sure.
Possibly with Nuendo? I have no experience with Nuendo, but I’m assuming it can do it too.
No, Dorico isn’t tied in with the Stienberg Media bay system at this time.
Use the Cubase Media Browser. It can list and audition all Steinberg VST sounds without setting up an endpoint for it manually.
This includes Groove Agent, Padshop, LoopMash, etc.
Example here in Cubase Pro 10.5:
Open Media Bay in Cubase (F5)
Type in a search for a sound you know exists in your HALion library.
Click it, after a moment a portion of a qwerty keyboard will show up in the bottom pane. There’s an invisible instance of HALion in there that has loaded the sound for you.
There you can click the UI, or tap the relevant keys on your system keyboard and audition the sound.
I believe that with Cubase 10 and later, it’s also possible to load a midi file and have it played from here, and perhaps some other things.
You can also adjust the various database tags for a sound from here. Including star ratings.
While exploring the power of Media Bay, check out things like:
Right Click a sound. Notice options to instantly set up an instrument track in your project with the sound loaded and ready to go in a fresh instance of which ever plugin the VST sound is officially married with (many things H6 can play, are actually tagged as Sonic or Sonic SE presets, so don’t be surprised if using this option loads most things in Sonic or SE rather than HALion).
You can also drag and drop this stuff to various places in your DAW.
Example:
Drag from Media Bay into an instrument slot of an open HALion 6 instance.
Example:
Drag from Media Bay into a slot of a HALion 6 program tree.
Example:
Drag from Media Bay to the project window of Cubase (a fresh instrument track is created with the sound loaded).
I’m not sure about this, but I believe the media bay can also be taught to audition non Steinberg sounds, from third party plugins. In the least, I’m pretty sure you can save ‘track presets’ for commonly used instruments with such preloaded plugins and endpoints, where they can be auditioned in this manner before loading them into a project. See the manual for more information.
With other DAWs not so much that I know of unless it allows you to establish some form of instrument track presets which the DAW can audition.
To audition a sound directly in an existing HALion/Sonic/SE instance, as far as I know, it needs to be loaded into an instrument slot first.