Halion Symphonic Orchestra confusion

Hi everyone,

One of my friends bought a Cubase 5 at the very beginning of this year and was very pleased with HSO came with C5. So when the trial date expired he wanted to purchase the 16-bit version permanent license via online shop. But at there he found it said Cubase 6 is required for purchasing the HSO.
He didn’t mind to upgrade cuz he knew C6 has a lot of great functions he wanted. He bought the upgrade from a local shop right away, activated the C6 license and bought the HSO via online shop in a minute. He thought the HSO should be working just like the HSO in C5.
But after opening the project made with C5 and the “old HSO”. It still shows that his trial license has been expired. Then he started to realize that the new HSO he bought is now located in Halion Sonic Se as a sound set.
Now he is depressed for dozens of old projects need to be reproduced. Which is a huge work. And he needs more clicks to find the orchestra sounds because he has to filter the sound first in HSSE.<-He uses orchestra sound exclusively when composing.

So my question is, is there any better way to make his old projects work without purchasing the full HSO? What’s the difference between HSO sounds in C5 and in C6 except the interface and the new note expression function.

My HSO SE license acquired with Cubase 5 contains the following entries:
“HALion Symphonic Orchestra 1.x
HALion Player OEM”
and it allows me to run both the old player and samples and the new HSSE and the sound set.
What does your friend’s license say?

it said
trial expired
“HALion Symphonic Orchestra 1.x
HALion Player OEM”
he owns the license
Cubase 6
Halion Symphonic Orchestra VST. set


When did you buy your HSO?


I’m confused

I am not sure how to fix this but I can help with the confusion.

The problem is that they are two different instruments. The demo in Cubase 5 is the HSO instrument while the soud set in Cubase 6 is for the Halion Sonic SE instrument.

Somehow, he needs to transfer the MIDI track or file from the HSO instrument to the HSSE instrument Maybe someone who owns HSO instrument (or can still install and use the demo for the trial period) can open the project and export the MIDI files?
HTH
J.L.

I bought my HSO SE in 2009 with Cubase 5 when it just came out.
If your friend’s license only mentions Halion Symphonic Orchestra VST. set, then I guess he can’t use it with the old player and sounds, in which case he will need to load new sounds into HALion Sonic SE and remap his MIDI tracks manually, which shouldn’t be such a difficult task to accomplish as he can access the media bay from within HALion Sonic SE easily. Just tell him to keep the old projects backup for automation and other settings reference.

HOW TO DO THIS:

To minimize clicks while doing this he could set “HALion Sonic SE multi-timbral” as the destination for imported MIDI tracks in the preferences (MIDI=>MIDI File=>Import Options). Then he would simply need to export an old project’s MIDI (File=>Export=>MIDI File) - a one step operation, no need to export every single MIDI track separately - and then import this MIDI file into a new project. Cubase will automatically load HSSE into the instrument rack, create MIDI tracks, name them and the parts on them as they were in the old project, set their channels as in the old project and assign them to the corresponding channels in HSSE. Your friend will only have to load the right samples into every channel of HSSE (using the media bay from within HSSE).

By the way, MIDI file export is very flexible in Cubase, allowing one to export patch, markers, inserts, sends, automation etc.

Thank you very much.

Sounds handy. I will let him give a try. :slight_smile:
:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

No worries.
I recently dug out my floppy disks with old projects done in my “Kurzweil K2000 Era” as I call it (circa 1998 AD - 2004 AD) and decided to transfer them into Cubase both as MIDI and audio files for the reference, while my synth is still alive (it’s on its last legs). Now that was a hell of a job to do, considering the number of projects and the amount of audio recording work necessary for it.