I came to the forum to say that after upgrading C14 → C15 everthing selected, I don’t see Writing Room Synths in Halion Sonic’s MediaBay panel at the side. I only see All, Flux, Iconica Sketch, Sonic Selection, and Trip? Is that right for a full install?
So I delved online a bit and ended up asking Claude (I know, sorry) - and it said use F5 MediaBay to add the install location Z:\Downloads\Steinberg to some scan path. However when I opened up the main MediaBay window - is this a superset of what Halion Sonic shows me? Why would I ever go into the MediaBay with F5. It looks very confusing, the left hand treeview shows All Media, Favorites, This Computer, VST Sound (what?), Factory Content, and User Content.
I don’t see anywhere to say “look in these folders for Halion Sonic Instruments” “look here for loops”.
If I expand “Factory Content” - surely Writing Room Synths is Factory Content, right - there’s nothing about instruments. Nor is it shown in VST Sound.
When I look click to select the parent “VST Sound” the right window shows a logical/attribute filter? So I tried the filter INSTRUMENT – CONTAINS – writing, but nothing happens.
I’m very confused. Should I just RTFM about MediaBay, and how to make Writing Room Synths show up?
It would seem Claude pointed you in a slightly wrong direction (nothing wrong with asking an AI for help, but sometimes they do lead us astray).
Media Bay is the librarian used in Cubase to catalog all the media available. Not just the Halion variants, but also presets for other VSTi’s like Retrologue, Audio & MIDI Loops, Audio Samples, Cubase Projects etc. - pretty much any media resource can be added to its index. Essentially it’s a big database of the media on your DAW.
What you want to do is, using your computer’s file system (not Media Bay) go to the folder where you downloaded the Instruments. Then double+click on any .vstsound file. This will launch the Steinberg Library Manager which will register every .vstsound file it finds in that location plus every sub-folder it finds in that location. No need to directly use the Media Bay for this.
Also if you just want to find/use say Halion presets there is no reason to use Media Bay. Using the Preset Browser in Halion (or Retrologue, etc.) will show you all the Halion presets you have (although under the hood it is just a stripped down version of Media Bay).
For now you can just ignore the Media Bay’s existence. And if later you find keeping track of the Media in your Projects starting to get unwieldy then give it a second look.
It’s a seperate download from the download manager under Cubase 15
I’m sorry do you mean it’s not downloaded within Download Manager or are you suggesting I’d find it under the Cubase 15 treeview of installs within download manager.
In Cubase 15 within the Download Manager it’s definitely not there.
I looked lower and there is “All Products (separate licenses requried)” which I’ve usually ignored because I never bought any. I don’t own Violinse, Voice of Wind Adey, Warehouse, Wave —> but look, here’s the beauty
I never thought to look in there as most things I don’t have licenses for. Anyhow, I’m up and running now. Now I might have a peek inside VST Cloud, VST Live, Wavelab and Complementary Products to see if I’ve missed anything.
Thanks for your help everyone, I’m still not quite sure why Writing Room Synths couldn’t be installed within the Cubase AI 15 set of installs.
Writing Room Synths is not part of Cubase AI. Only Artist and Pro get it. What you started now is the trial version, which will prompt you in 30 or 60 days with “end of licence, please purchase”.
The Download manager’s page for “my products”, lists all program that you have a licence for. These you can download and use freely. What’s not there you have to buy a licence to own. You can download them, but you can only use them as Trial versions for a period of time as Johnny says.
Ah! That’s it! I’d bought the upgrade and not input the serial number - when I saw Cubase AI 15 I assumed by buying the upgrade on my account it had auto-registered and that they’d added ‘AI’ to jump on that current bandwagon. Now after inputting the registration code/serial no. I see the same list of Virtual Instruments you do, under the separate Cubase 15 Pro icon. Thank you all for helping me.
The Drum Machine is not a VST instrument plugin. It is built directly into Cubase like the Sampler Control Track. It is found in the lower zone of the Project window.
It is only available in the Pro and Artist versions.
I’m still not exactly sure what’s in those presets though, it seems to be roughly analgous to loading a preset into Groove Agent, i.e. it’s the sounds and the patterns.
