Hi folks,
Picture this:
I’ve programmed a beat in Halion.
Now i want to audition other kick drums quickly and easily while cubase is playing the midi sequence. So i want to go through a folder containing a hundred kick sample WAVs to see if i can find one i prefer.
I can’t find a simple function in Halion whereby you can (with one keystroke) load the next WAV in the folder to your zone.
I’m sure Halion had this feature years ago!
Any ideas?
Thanks! …J
Swap in the keyzone section?
Ouch. I don’t know if you can even do that this deep inside editing, someone correct me if wrong?
I would not be surprised if it used to have this feature, Battery 3 had it (which I recommend for drums, now that I have read a few recent threads), Battery 4 dropped this very important feature.
Drums in Halion seem like a difficult thing to set up, it’s already hard enough for custom kits in Battery, but I respect the effort and you should get a ton of control out of it when your done.
Thanks…i guess i just mean right / left buttons in the sample editor window that goes to next / previous sample in the folder. This is how Kontakt does it.
I’d love to use Battery but the envelopes are so basic / crappy in it i just can’t do what i want to do. Halion is waaay deeper but you’re right, not quite the instant gratification of Battery or Groove Machine.
I’m really getting into Halion now. The learning curve was pretty steep but once you get your head around it, it’s crazy powerful.
Yeah I know what you mean. Maybe make a feature request for this and see what they say, I guess.
I think it’s ADHSR envelopes in Battery, still no user defined points, and you cannot automate the envelope points in a way that I like. I’m making such simple kits that simple envelopes are fine for me, but occasionally the time comes when Battery is too simplified. I could go on and on here with a Battery feature requests list, but I think I’ll leave it be 
If you’re working in Cubase, why not take advantage of the Media Bay? It was designed to quickly locate and audition (as well as tag and organize) samples, loops, midiloops, midi files, etc.
Tap F5 to bring it up, play around with it and read up on it in the Cubase manual.
You may need to tell Media Bay where your samples are living on your hard drive. Once you set up a node for the directories holding your samples…you’re good to go. Pull up Media bay, limit it to displaying content in your desired folder…type in searches (and even use or set up tag based search frames), click anything showing you want to audition and press the play button at the bottom of media bay.
When you find something you want to actually try in Halion, just drag and drop it on the zone map desired in Halion…
Here’s a screenshot (Using 3 monitors so I’ve got it all spread out with things in full screen, but you can scale it down and arrange things as desired).
I’ll often test stuff on a fresh unused key in my zone map (just drag it onto a key straight from media bay) so it doesn’t matter what velocity I test at…once I like it I’ll move it to the key and velocity range I want.
If you have Cubase Pro, you can also ‘export’ instrument tracks (or groups of them) into ‘midiloops’ that can be auditioned directly from media-bay without having to manually set up an instrument track and load it into the rack. This really comes in handy if you want to store an entire VSTi based ‘loop’ that you’ve built.
Halion is best when you treat it as ‘an extension of Cubase’. It all has the capability to meld into one giant instrument. In fact you can sample, edit, and audition things right in the DAW itself onto a track, and then drag the track events right into Halion.
If you’re not on Cubase, Halion 5 should also have a Media Browser of its own with audition capabilities. You can open it in a frame, or pop it out to its own window.
I.E. Pop it out to a window of its own, and then you can audition things and drag the ones you want right onto a zone’s map.
Select a zone. Right click and choose Replace Sample or press command-R. This opens a standard OS file selector. The function used to actually select the sample that was already loaded in the zone, but it doesn’t work correctly any more, at least it doesn’t on my Mac. It does open the containing folder, though. You can navigate to your folder of kick drums and use the up/down arrow keys to audition them. Make sure the Prelisten Samples box is checked and I believe you want the Keep Zone Root Key option.
Thanks for the info guys, i’m gonna check out those techniques!