HSO not loading after installing Win10

Hi,
I just made the switch from Win7 to Win10, mainly because I want to use the Elgado streamdeck.
There is now a problem with the HSO sounds. Dorico chooses the normal Halion sounds as before (using the HSSE+HSO (Pro) template) but the Orchestra sound slots in Halion stay empty. I can load them manualy however. I have the Steinberg-Content folder on a separate “Library” disk, and it is installed alright.
I even tried to reinstall the HALion Symphonic Orchestra packages but the installer says they are already installed. Still Dorico will not load the HSO sound automaticly as before.
What can I do?

Thanks in advance.

Perhaps try uninstalling HALion Symphonic Orchestra and then running the installer again?

Or try deleting the folder C:\Users<yourname>\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\VSTAudioEngine2_64
That will enforce a rescan of the contents files on next Dorico startup.

After deleting VSTAudioEngine2-64 the Orchestra sounds work again, but now the HSSE sounds are gone.
Also in Nuendo the HSonic plug is not working anymore.
I reinstalled HalionSonicSE from the Dorico Download assistant but isn’t clear witch of the sound paths it is using. There is a HALion Library Manager witch surprisingly points to a VST Sound folder in the users appdata with yet again doubles of the .vstsound’s
De Steinberg-Content folder on my Libraries disk is a real mess with doubles etc.

What can I do best?

Update: I did a reinstall of HALionSonicSE and now eveything seems to work again.
However, there are lots of VSTsound folders and doubles on my Library disk and also in the AppData…Content folder.
Is there a way to see witch of the folders can be deleted?

The HALion Library Manager shows you the paths that are used, the others you can delete.

Be careful…
Depending upon options checked when installing things, HALion installers will sometimes use a combination of ‘shortcuts’ which point to actual vstsound archives. So…if library manager points to a ‘short cut’ that then points to a vstsound archive, and you delete the actual archive while leaving the shortcut…well…trouble.

If you delete an actual archive and leave a shortcut to it in place…trouble…

Personally I like to get rid of the ‘short cuts’ that sometimes get scattered in various ‘user directories’ and move all HALion and GrooveAgent content somwhere in “%SYSTEMDRIVE%/ProgramData/Steinberg/” hierarchy of directories. All of the Stienberg apps with media bays know to look in this location for new or revised content on a regular basis. This helps insure that my Stienberg stuff will work no matter the user account one logs in with.

If I’m short on drive space for the partition/device…I still like to keep things HALion in “%SYSTEMDRIVE%/ProgramData/Steinberg/”, but I’ll simply use ntfs junctions to point from there to the secondary device/partition.

If for some reason you do NOT want other accounts on the system to have access to your Stienberg apps…then of course you could take opposite approach and lock things down in protected ‘user directories’.

If you use the library manager to move things it should go smoothy and everything be found. If something gets missed, one can force an instance of HALion to refresh its content in the HALion media browser. I.E. Open an instance of any variant of HALion (Sonic SE, Sonic, or HALion 5/6, Groove Agent 4, etc.), go to the media-bay, and click the ‘refresh’ button. You could do that in stand alone mode, or from a plug in variant. My understanding is that the core HALion engine is same for the whole family of plugins (different UIs and features enabled)…so you’d only have to refresh it in ONE for them all to pick on the content in future sessions.

If you also happen to have Cubase, Nuendo, HALion 5/6, or GrooveAgent 4 on the system, you can also customize your rig by adding or deleting directories (or entire hierarchies of them) that the HALion engine will ‘keep scanned pretty much at all times’ for potential content.

P.S.

Almost every time Microsoft pushes a major Windows 10 update, I have to reinstall eLicenser Control, and sometimes even half of my legacy system drivers (unsigned stuff, or drivers signed for Windows 7/8/or earlier that work perfectly fine in 10, but just don’t have the latest format of digital signatures). I’d absolutely expect to have to do that after making a full OS version jump.

ANY time I run into a problem with anything Steinberg, the FIRST thing I do is insure I have the latest version of the Steinberg eLiscenser app and run the installer. It fixes things more often than not for me. Here lately I just KNOW…after the big Microsoft Blue Update screen…I’d better go ahead and reinstall eLicenser before I launch Dorico or Cubase, then check to see if all my device drivers survived the ‘update’.

For some reason unknown to me, Microsoft updates tend to change something that breaks security and blacklists a bunch of file permissions, wipes out half my system drivers (anything older that uses older drivers) and forces me to reinstall a bunch of stuff…starting with things that control usb dongles. I also find that I often lose half the user profiles of anything involving ‘networking’. It’s a pain, and it doesn’t just effect things Steinberg for me.

Things I have to reinstall after Microsoft Updates include:
Most things involving USB dongles. Steinberg, iLok, etc…
M-Audio Delta 1010 drivers. I must run a repair on this every time to get the control panel back.
Roland Fantom XR MIDI USB drivers.
User profiles for most thing involving my network (network settings, automated logins involving user passwords, etc.)
Sometimes it ditches the control panel for my Tascam US-1200 as well.

I’m boggled with the vstsound archives. The library manager just shows details; the move and remove buttons are greyed-out.
And then there are the ‘short cuts’.
The reason I like the archives to reside outside the system drive is that I make system backups and don’t want them to be too big.
But for the moment I give up for as long as it works.

When doing system ‘backups’ tell the backup software to ignore the folders hosting HALion content. If that’s not possible with your backup solution, you could move the HALion content to some other drive, copy it, and paste ‘short cuts’ back onto the system drive.

In Windows 10 you can make a systemcopy (an image) of the system drive, whitch is for protection. You can mount this imagefile as a virtual HD so all the files are there. I don’t want to have all of my lybraries included though, so I have them on a separate disc, whitch is no problem exept from the Steinberg content; trying to move the VST soundfiles to another drive results in all kinds of obscure behaviour.

If you are doing an ‘image’ backup, then filesystem junctions will do the job, as the ‘junctions/links’ are backed up, but not the contents of the directories they ‘point at’ (residing on a different partition).

Example:

  1. Copy a directory from ProgramData to a different drive/partition.

I.E.
xcopy /e /i /h /k /x /b “%SYSTEMDRIVE%/ProgramData/Steinberg/Content” “E:/HALion Content”

Personally I like to use xcopy from an administrative prompt (instead of just dragging from the file explorer) to do the job since I can set flags to preserve things like file permissions, dates, timestamps, "copy links instead of files they point to’, etc.


Then rename the original directory that you just copied. (Note I copied it instead of ‘moving it’ as a precaution. You can test the setup to make sure it is working before deleting anything.)

I.E.
ren “%SYSTEMDRIVE%/ProgramData/Steinberg/Content” “%SYSTEMDRIVE%/ProgramData/Steinberg/Content.bak”

  1. Using a command prompt in admin mode, make a junction to the new location.
    mklink /j “%SYSTEMDRIVE%/ProgramData/Steinberg/Content” “E:/HALion Content”

  2. Test it to make sure things work. If all went well, you can then delete “%SYSTEMDRIVE%/ProgramData/Steinberg/Content.bak”.

Works great…been doing it for years on systems with smaller SD system drives.

Remember to use junctions (/j), as opposed to /d for symbolic links, or /h for hard links), and restrict it to pointing at entire directories (as opposed to individual files) and you should be fine.

Thanks for the explanation. I’m going to study and try…

geerie,
Bumping because I added some example steps and hyperlinks in the previous post.

And here’s a link to an older thread/post on the topic with some more information: