I wish the presets in Halion 6 were better arranged / presented. I’m mostly talking about the sampled sounds in this post not the synthesis engines.
There’s a load of sampled sounds in there - some of them are really good, some of them are poor. A lot of the time of the time I’d like to know what presets share the same base samples for example. I feel you really have to know some tricks to navigate the samples - like for example some of the XXL are pretty good - some of the VX patches are pretty good. I shouldn’t have to go digging. I much prefer Logic’s presentation, where it’s obvious what patches share the same samples.
I use the Eagle and Raven piano patches for example because it’s obvious that they’re their own entity, and I know what I’m getting.
The system is made more complicated by the fact that the different preset managers don’t communicate - so if I mark an XXL patch 5 stars in Halion 6, Halion Sonic won’t know about it. And that might not seem like a huge deal until you go in to the sound browser in the media menu and realise that different sound presets are assigned to different VSTs - so some presets originate from Halion Sonic or Halion 6 or Halion SE even!
It’s a bit of a mess. This isn’t a bash, I love Cubase and Halion, I just under use the existing sounds in Halion because I assume they’re not good enough - where as if I do go digging, sometimes some of the sounds there are good, and do have the velocity layers / round robins that I want.
Also some of the larger patches that have keyswitches, have no explanation of what they are.
How does everyone else navigate the Halion sounds?