Halion On Mac-Still a Nightmare!

Virtual instruments HALion
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Halion on the Apple Silicon is the most buggy program that I have ever used. It’s not getting better at all either. No updates. No communication. No “hey we’re fixing this”. Just silence.

Here are the problems that need to be fixed NOW:

WORST: DOES NOT WORK WELL WITH LOGIC!
If you have a Mac and are on Halion-buy Falcon! With Halion you are FORCED to use Rosetta. Halion can’t even keep its shape! It crashes atrociously .

The List

  1. The program tree is broken. Load a new layer and the wrong window pops up. Sometimes you can delete layers. Sometimes you cannot. Sometimes you load a new layer onto your sound and it REPLACES your total sound. This has been going on since version 6 and Steinberg needs to get this together now.

  2. Constant Crashing-INSANE!
    Halion crashes my sessions DAILY. I’ve lost over a hundred sounds because the program would just crash the WHOLE DAW while I was saving a preset. That preset is now trash. Years of work. Gone.

  3. GUI Broken
    The GUI is totally hosed. Try grabbing a “send”. It’s tricky isn’t it. How about popups appearing UNDER the mouse pointer! This stuff should have been fixed years ago.

  4. Jumping Windows
    The AUX window can’t keep its shape. Channel ONE always expands for some strange reason. Just annoying.

5.Fiddly Interface
Resizing windows. Moving windows. Not good.

At some point something has got to give. I have no clue what’s going on with Halion, but I have zero confidence in the program.

I get that Halion may not be a big seller or an industry standard. That does not mean that the developers can’t be held to a higher standard. I feel like if you can’t fix the program-you should be offering some kind of a refund. Or something.

Because of A.T.S SKYFALL I’m kinda stuck with Halion. If I could have worked out how to do frequency augmentation in Falcon I would have. UVI is killing it. We’re not even in the race.

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Sorry you’re having problems. This statement is untrue. I run HALion 7 in native Apple Silicon mode exclusively. Never had any issues with stand-alone or in DAW at all.

I suggest you look into “backing up” your files. Mac has TimeMachine built in, and it’s completely autonomous. Sorry you lost years of work though.

I stopped using Logic a couple of years ago so I can’t test with that, but I don’t have any of the issues you’re experiencing. If you are crashing daily you should post the .ips file, otherwise no one will be able to effectively help.

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I also can’t find what the issue is. I recently upgraded to Halion 7 during a sale and I found it even better than all the previous versions of “Halion Sonic / SE” I’ve used before. It is running smoothly in Nuendo 14 and Cubase 13 natively on my M1 Mac Studio Ultra.

The additional content is amazing - the Piano’s, the synths, X-Stream is mindblowing (and I love the new spectral OSC in H7)

Nuendo 14 does give me a crash once a week - but that’s not caused by Halion.

What I would suggest:

  1. Check if your DAW runs in Native mode
  2. What other plugins are loaded? Your crashes may well be caused by other thirdparty plugins that are somehow interfering with the memory allocation of Halion
  3. Do a user permissions check on your hard drive. I’ve had issues after upgrading my OS in the past and fixing user permissions have helped in some cases
  4. Try to load your DAW in Safe Mode (discarding your current settings temporarily) - also testing on another mac can yield interesting insights
  5. Check if your Mediabay is scanning anything or has scanned everything properly

I do agree on the interface issues. Halion has one of the ugliest UI’s I’ve ever seen and the preset browser just makes me cringe every time. Additionally, I don’t understand how I am not able to simply turn off a reverb or other effects on some of the factory patches. This should be an easy thing to do, but apparently some stuff is locked down by Steinberg. Something that could be improved…

I did propose an upgrade to the UI in another forum post some months ago but got no reaction :stuck_out_tongue: - which can mean two things: 1. We don’t care or 2. We’re working on it but will keep our mouths shut till the new version is out

One more thing:
What I had to learn over the years, coming from transitioning from 32 to 64Bit VST Cubase and later from Intel to M1 Native…it’s good to always have printed instrument parts or stems of your project. Just in case. So I always keep that shortcut handy after I’ve tracked that one part of that VST I am unsure if the Developer is still updating it. Shift-CMD-R (I’ve set this up in Cubase/Nuendo) renders it into an audio part - at least I can still preserve it that way, somehow.

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Sorry to correct you in this subject. Since you started with HALion Sonic your Steinberg criticism back in March 2021 (Halion Sonic Crashing Logic)
I requested several times now more infos like OS, screen resolution, Logic version, HALion version, Logic projects, HALion presets, crashlogs, … to be able to reproduce and to fix the problems.
More than 4 years and you provided nothing up to now !!!

You asked other Apple M1, Logic, HALion users if they can confirm your findings. If I remember right there was in 4 years only one user, who had in one aspect something similar ( but not the same).
To make it short. As long as we’re not able to reproduce the problems from the one and only person with the most buggy program, there will be no updates nor fixes which will help you in any way.

Just out of curiosity: Back in 2022 (The Future of Sound is Upon US! SKYFALL!) you wrote:

How did you manage to create more than 10 000 sounds if it’s crashing all the time?

So please, Amadeus-e.d.p aka Spidermix (banned from KVR Audio) or whatever your name is right now. Provide some useful input/infos or leave us alone.

To all the other great HALion users out there, please apologize my sarcasm and offending words but even if it’s not apparent, we at Steinberg are working hard to provide you the best value for your hard earned money. But the contributions from Amadeus-e.d.p on this matter lead to nothing and are simply a waste of time.

best regards
Gerrit Junge

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Thank you for this. No apology needed from this user’s perspective. Keep up the good work, sir.

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For random passers that might come across this thread…

I’ve been using HALion since version 5…

Anytime I’ve ever found a bug or issue (none of them were showstoppers, and they all had 2 or more alternatives to do the same job until it got fixed) and properly reported it (maybe two times in all these years, obscure things that apparently no one else was using back then to notice), it was fixed in the very next release!

It might not be for everyone, but it’s a solid instrument with deep and powerful sound design tools that sounds great! Since the dongle requirements were lifted way back with HALion 6, anyone could easily take it for free test drive for a full month or more before committing to buying. Nobody has to go into the HALion experience ‘blind’.

If you’re in the market for something like HALion, don’t listen to drivel like the OP put up. Grab a demo key and TRY IT FOR YOURSELF.

As for display issues and such…that’s not always squarely on an application designer/programmer. Quite often it’s an OS, video card, or monitor issue.

More than once I’ve gotten my hands on cutting-edge high-resolution video cards or monitors that initially had ‘bugs and issues’ in the drivers and setup apps! Swap the stuff out with some older/more mature technology, and the issues go away. I reported such things to the proper people, with logs and test scripts so they could duplicate it, and within a few months those got sorted out too! I’ve also seen cases where the UI stuff built into the OS, or complier/dev tools being used were borked…again, if properly reported, it got put into the jiri right away, and somebody researched the problem and solved it PDQ.

I don’t think the OP here even gave Steinberg a ‘chance’ to help him find and fix whatever issues he might have had.

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Nope every single post of his is either about his ‘super awesome game changing’ Skyfall presets or how horrible HALion is, which like Gerrit, I’m confused about. If HALion is that horrible and crashes left and right, how was he able to make this AMAZING instrument that somehow sounds better then the engine it was created with??

He’s the one user from the forum I’ve put on my ignore list so I can’t even read what he’s whining about this time, but I guarantee he won’t do anything but complain despite folks telling him ‘That’s not how it goes, give us some information so we can help’. I thought the ignore list would remove his posts completely so they wouldn’t clog up the useful ones, but they’re still there, it’s just his content is ‘ignored’ hehe.

@Gerrit_Junge - You and the rest of the team are doing an AWESOME job, keep up the great work!!

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The problem is that you have NO CLUE it happened until you go to load that preset again. Over 2,500 presets makes Time Machine diving ludicrous.

It shouldn’t be happening to begin with. Period.

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The Shill Force NEVER misses an opportunity!

Yeah because you invented next generation sound design topologies. Plus you created your own workstation. Plus you figured out how to run 4 augmentation engines inside Halion. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

Drivel that.

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Time to make 2,500 presets, make different accounts to slam products and people with angry posts, but too busy to bother posting crash logs, test scripts, screen captures, or anything else of that nature to assist a dev team in fixing the alleged issue?

You can call me what you want. The thread isn’t about me. It’s about a product. I’ve never seen perfect Windows or Mac software as complicated as something like HALion in my life once it hits the streets to be installed in many different machines, for a dozen or more languages, etc. I’ve even owned a brand new Mac Performa in the past that crashed every hour or two no matter what was running on it (bad machine (Apple eventually sent a new one on warranty).

How I treated the ‘people’ involved made the difference in my ultimate level of satisfaction. If one is not a prick about everything, and offers useful information to solve problems, you see your issues fixed, and probably get invited to beta teams. Piss off the people that make up the chain of communication from the streets to the dev JIRI, then it’s that much longer until someone properly finds and reports the problem.

Even people who earn a living TRYING to find the weaknesses of a product typically put up proof, and test scripts to recreate the issue on multiple platforms and configurations.

There is a difference between ‘shilling’ and simply being a decent/fair human being. Meaningful crits that can be verified and duplicated are useful. The rest is suspect (some kind of troll).

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:clap:

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Brian—thanks. This is a final, respectful reply. I’ll be launching an official thread soon and wanted to engage others constructively. That said, continuing to push claims I’ve already disproven—especially when I have footage from all three of my retail locations—starts to look like intentional misrepresentation. Stalking (across multiple forums). Just weirdo behavior nobody in the world would do

If you’re just an employee with no real stake, maybe ease off the personal jabs. My team’s been building for over eight years, and we operate at a level that doesn’t need to justify itself to anonymous forum noise. I’m the sole sound designer, managing three stores and handling real-world logistics. If you think I have time to entertain forum drama, think again.

I’ve already invested in clarity—literally. If you’re confident in your stance, fine. But if you’re just here to stir up confusion or shut down valid concerns, that’s a problem. Threads being marked “solved” while bugs persist? That’s not transparency.

Also, maybe you’ve never worked retail, but store managers rarely use their own codes or keys—we delegate. If you walked into my store, you’d see me on the computer, but the cameras might show my #1 logging in. That’s standard practice across major chains. You can’t be everywhere at once when customers are flooding in to try on clothes.

One of the more unfortunate patterns I’ve seen is people getting so emotionally invested that they put themselves at serious financial risk—often without compensation. I wouldn’t do that personally. But if things line up the way they appear to, especially with you following me and actively trying to discredit a product you’ve never even seen, that’s a risky position to take. I’d advise caution.

And just to be clear—this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Making statements about someone in the U.S., especially in a state with a highly active Attorney General’s office, can carry real consequences. I say that with full awareness, because we know the landscape and the people involved. Again, I’d advise caution.

Let’s keep it classy from here on out. No more replies from me. But if this escalates, expect a different kind of a response. My employees can sign for up to $3000 as if it were me. Sign for scripts. Sign taxes. Sign sales license info. Oh yeah, plus I told you no thanks. Unrequited crushing is hard. But no means no jealous Brian.

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@Amadeus-e.d.p This is entirely inappropriate for the forum. Please have a look at the Guidelines - Steinberg Forums.