All references to Halion are to the Halion Sonic 7 that comes stock with Dorico.
Last night when I returned to a couple of projects I had saved but left open all instruments in Halion 7 were gone. Everything had been there and working fine when I last worked with those two projects, just yesterday morning. Now the Halion window is blank in the area at the lower right where the different VSTs or sound groups, whatever those are called, have always been. When I click on the big “All” button at the top right, nothing happens, of course. The Library Manager shows everything, or lots of things anyway, is/are installed and gives all of the locations on disk.
I have had no other VSTs connected to Dorico.
I have done Preferences->VST Plug-ins->Clear Audio Engine Cache. I have restarted Dorico and my computer.
Help, please.
EDIT: Other symptoms include no VST3 section in the Preferences window (an empty VST2 section is present) and the absence of a Vst3Plugin SearchPaths.xml file in the audio engine folder.
I’ve now also tried “Reset Audio Engine Data”; deleting the Dorico 6 AudioEngine VST3 Cache folder; removing all restrictions on write/modify on the Dorico 6 AudioEngine_64 folder; and deleting that entire folder (Dorico 6 AudioEngine_64. Each time I made sure that the audio engine had terminated before restarting Dorico.
First I would test a good few documents – ideally, that you haven’t worked on recently. If none of them playback, then you can rule out some issue with the way that HALion is presenting the instruments.
Probably the easiest thing to do is to reinstall the libraries from the Download Assistant, which may reset whatever is broken or misconfigured.
Thanks, that was the first thing I tried (opening other files). Halion is just gone. All the VST files are present on the computer, but Dorico isn’t picking them up. Dorico consumes hours.
Maybe I should have tried this before reinstalling everything, but after finishing the Halion reinstall there was no change in Dorico–still none of the sounds showing on the Halion page. But I did confirm that Halion standalone was working, or at least displaying all the sounds. So then in Dorico I added a new “VST instrument” on the play panel and selected for it as the engine/actual VST Steinberg->Synth->Halion Sonic. That instance (VST instrument “03”) of Halion did now show all the instruments. So then I tried taking the “02” instrument that contained the original instance of Halion, setting it to “------” and resetting it to Halion. Now instrument 02 also has all the sounds.
So now I have a way to access Halion sounds in Dorico again. But these new instantiations of Halion (naturally) are blank–Dorico has not recalled the VST sounds I assigned to the Halion slots. I have a considerable number of projects with carefully chosen instrument assignments. Must I redo all that work? Or is there some other fix for this issue that will make the existing Halion instruments in Dorico actually connect to the Halion sounds?
Is it possible that you’ve installed “HALion”, as well as “HALion Sonic”…? The former is the full, “Pro” sampler and player; the latter is the entry-level player, which you get with Dorico.
If you’ve installed full HALion, but don’t have a licence for it, then that might explain it.
In Dorico’s Preferences, there is an option for which (available) HALion plug-in Dorico should use:
Sorry, hard to keep the nomenclature straight but I only have the Halion that comes with Dorico. On the Windows start menu all I see is Halion Sonic. Again, everything was working when I hibernated the computer without closing the projects or Dorico (yesterday morning).
I have a suspicion about why the sounds went all away on your machine. To check on that, please open a Command Prompt window and copy & paste the command:
dir /S /Q /N C:\ProgramData\Steinberg\Content > %userprofile%\Desktop\SMTGContents.txt
After hitting the return key the file SMTGContents.txt should appear on your desktop. Please zip it up and post here. Thanks
Hi there Ulf, thanks for your help. As I’ve said above, the content is present on my system: Halion Sonic itself loads showing it, and after reinstalling all the Dorico-supplied VSTs I can now create new instances of Halion Sonic within Dorico and those new instances display all the sounds (just as they have done until yesterday). The issue now is that the existing instances of Halion in my projects are empty of sounds, even though the names of the sounds as I assigned them are still visible in the Halion slots.
In case I’ve misunderstood what you’re looking for, I’m attaching a PDF showing the contents of my C:\ProgramData\Steinberg\Content folder. The command you asked me to use threw an error (in an Cmd with admin privileges), so I used a utility I have to create the listing.
No change. I don’t have Cubase, but I did run the plugin setup utility, with Dorico closed, and existing Halion racks (is that what they’re called?) are still devoid of assignable sounds. If I search for “piano” in the search bar next to at the right next to the “All” button, the instrument list below that remains empty.
