Etude and Electric Bass Look Ok Everywhere, but won't show up in Cubase

Cubase
1

I posted this in the Halion chat and have had a support ticket open with Steinberg for over a week, but no reply. Can someone please help?
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I have purchased Etude Piano and Electric Bass from the Steinberg shop.

The licenses activated without issues, the downloads completed successfully (I’ve reinstalled them a couple of times), and both libraries appear correctly in Steinberg Library Manager with no errors. However, the presets are not showing up in HALion Sonic 7’s MediaBay or preset browser when I load HALion Sonic SE (or HALion) inside Cubase 15.

Here’s what I’ve already checked/troubleshooted:

  • File locations (macOS):

    • /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content/HALion/VST Sound/OSX/Electric Bass

    • /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content/HALion/VST Sound/OSX/Etude

    When I double-click any .vstsound file inside these folders, a pop-up message says they are already activated/registered.

  • I’ve fully rescanned plugins in Cubase (Studio > VST Plug-in Manager > Rescan All).

  • I’ve restarted Cubase, rebooted the MacBook, and even tried opening HALion Sonic 7 standalone.

I see no reason why they shouldn’t work. Despite all of the above, when I add an Instrument Track with HALion Sonic SE (or HALion), search for “Etude” or “Electric Bass” in the preset browser/MediaBay, nothing appears.
I’m on an M4 Mac running Tahoe with Cubase 15 and Dorico 6.2.

Can anyone advise other things I can look into?

2

Reposting with the hope that fresh eyes see this with a recommendation. I’ve had a support ticket entered long before I submitted this post, but no response. There seems to be no answer to making these work after weeks of trying on my own and trying to get help from Steinberg.

3

Have you checked the Activation Manager if the instruments are activated?

4

Hi JuergenP, Yes. I finally figured out the problem. I’ll post the solution in a sec to help anyone has similar issues to me.

5

I found the solution on my own. As always with things like this, it’s simple — but so is finding a needle in a haystack, especially when you’re dealing with a brand-new giant ecosystem.

The problem was that the installer placed the files in the correct parent directory… except it also created an extra subdirectory called “OSX” and put the instrument files in that. I have no idea why that happened, but I took a guess, copied the files up to the parent directory since these were the only instruments like that, and the others are working.

So the clue was hiding in plain sight in my first post.

File locations (macOS): – Doesn’t work

  • /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content/HALion/VST Sound/OSX/Electric Bass

  • /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content/HALion/VST Sound/OSX/Etude

File locations (macOS): – (OSX Subdirectory eliminated) Works!

  • /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content/HALion/VST Sound/Electric Bass

  • /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content/HALion/VST Sound/Etude

Hey @Steinberg Support, you can do better.