Dorico loads Halion instead of Halion Sonic SE (or Halion Sonic)

Dorico
1

Hi!
New Halion Sonic 7 replaces Halion Sonic SE 3. In Cubase everything works as expected - all previously saved projects that use Halion Sonic SE 3 loads with Halion Sonic 7 and all presets sounds (I hope) the same.

Now I run Dorico and it loads Halion 6 (the sampler, I still not upgraded to 7), not Halion Sonic 7 nor Halion Sonic SE 3 which still is in system. Why Dorico made such changes?

Secondly, if I load Halion Sonic (7), I have empty instance. But when loading any Playback Template, it loads Halion 6 again.

3

Hi Arthur,
at this moment we don’t know why this is happening, but I’ve raised it as an issue in our bug database and we will investigate on it.

4

Thank you.
For now I restored from backup all .vstsound files (some was updates for HS7) and reinstalled Halion 6.4 with Sonic 3. Now everything works as before, flawlessly. Dorico is loading HSSE 3.4.

If I had a bit more time, I’d like to be a Dorico beta tester to give a few cents for a better future :slight_smile:

5

Dorico 4.3 introduced a new option on the Play page of Preferences to specify which version of HALion Dorico will load when using a HALion-based playback template. By default, it will load the “best available” version of HALion, which will be the full HALion plug-in, if you have it, rather than HSSE or the new HALion Sonic 7.

3 Likes
6

Ouch!
Sorry, I didn’t know that. Somehow I miss this option. It’s the game changer :slight_smile:

Thank you very much!

7

Is there any plan to make this easier to understand, or to improve the integration between the various Steinberg libraries and playback templates? I am currently finding it easier to load third-party instruments e.g. from Spitfire or Kontakt libraries than to access the Gb or so of libraries that Steinberg just encouraged me to download after the latest update of the Download Manager. Are these, essentially, useless for Dorico users who don’t also use Cubase (my DAW is FL Studio)?

8

What specific libraries have you just been encouraged to download, Andrew?

9

Halion Sonic 7.020 - Instrument and Sonic SE Content
These sounded like promising titles and were large downloads.
Thanks for the swift interest!

10

Those are indeed the default sounds that Dorico uses when you use the factory playback template, e.g. when you choose HSO+HSSE (Pro), that playback template uses a combination of HALion Symphonic Orchestra (HSO) and the HALion Sonic SE library (HSSE, recently renamed to HALion Sonic Selection).

Dorico defaults to using all of the regular acoustic instrument sounds for its regular acoustic instruments, but of course the HSSE factory library includes lots of interesting sounds for hybrid or electronic music production. Generally these are simple to use and you can load them manually in HALion Sonic itself to replace the sounds that Dorico has already loaded, but Dorico doesn’t tend to use these more production-orientated sounds automatically because you’re typically writing for acoustic instruments in Dorico, and some kind of funky phasing, looping lead synth with effects is not normally a great choice for, say, a trumpet.

11

Using HSO+HSSE(Pro) seems the thing to do then. I had indeed encountered ‘Sonic Selection’ as an option which had a soprano saxophone which I was looking for. If I understand correctly, though, the HSO is going to be the older version that came with Dorico as I haven’t paid separately for HSO from Steinberg (as I already bought the BBCSO library from Spitfire).

The thing that seemed hard for me, given all this, was to work out how to get some reasonable defaults of instruments when first setting up a new arrangement. If it’s a small scoring then I am more comfortable mapping instruments one by one.

However following your advice I was able to load ‘triple woodwind’ OK in one pass which is the instrument set for which I find Halion most useful. So thanks.

Also thanks to John Barron whose short video on loading the BBCSO templates was extremely helpful just now.