I’d like to explore Halion 7 which came with Dorico Pro but every sound I’ve tried has rapid clicks happening, making the sounds unusable/unlistenable. I’ve searched through the forum and on Google and it doesn’t seem like others are having this problem. I’m on a Win 10 platform with 32 GB ram using a Focusrite audio interface set to maximum buffer of 1024 and 44.1 khz, same rate as Halion. I have no issues playing anything on Kontakt 7 or Musio. The issue is specific to Halion 7. Any suggestions for eliminating the clicks so I can explore what Halion 7 has to offer?
It’s a long shot, but you might try installing the content/libraries on a different hard drive. The Steinberg Library Manager (separate app in your OS start bar) makes it easy to ‘move’ HALion libraries around on your system.
Once upon a time I had a batch of PNY brand SSD drives I found on the cheap that were horrible at streaming audio (though quite fast and reliable for things that don’t need to ‘stream in real time’. They provided great BURST rates for stuff that gets loaded fully into memory right away).
I got glitches and clicks like crazy with ARIA/Sforzando and Kontakt. Stuff from Sonnivox was totally unusable. I noticed that in my case HALion, and even some monster libraries in ‘Play’ from East West was working fine for me. Turns out that I had the libraries for those on different Samsung media. I’d racked my brain for weeks trying to figure it out. The system kept passing every latency check and system test I could throw at it, but I did notice the drivers for those PNY drives were doing an awful lot of ‘system interrupts’ when streaming audio from them. A light bulb came on over my head!
I moved the sample libraries, and anything else that needs to ‘stream’ on a regular basis off those PNY drives, and my clicks went away for good. When it came to streaming through samplers and whatnot, or tracking audio/video…even old SATA2 era platter drives were better than those PNY units!
Thanks for the reply, @Brian_Roland . Halion 7 and associated content is stored on my main system drive, a 2 TB samsung SSD that works well for other streaming applications. It is in the default location selected by the installer at C:\Users\PCAudioLabs DAW\Downloads\Steinberg\WIN64. NI content which works perfectly is located on a slower 1 TB SATA3 disk drive. Since it’s already on my best drive I wouldn’t know where to try to move it to.
After checking the path in Library Manager I realized that Halion content is in C:\ProgramData\Steinberg\Content\Halion\VST Sound. Still looking for any help to eliminate the rhythmic clicking/popping sound that all samples play back with.
Another correction to the above info … I’m trying to use Halion Sonic 7 (the free player that came with Dorico), not Halion 7. Not sure if that makes a difference. My Scarlett 2i4 (1st gen) driver is set for round-trip latency of 102.2 ms, which is not adjustable.
I tried switching ASIO drivers to Steinberg and Generic, then back to Focusrite USB and the problem has disappeared and samples are playing back as expected.
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