HALion currently keeps two kinds of things under ~/Library and ~/Documents/Steinberg with no way to point either somewhere else:
- Saved Program/Layer presets: ~/Library/Audio/Presets/Steinberg Media Technologies/HALion 7/
- Exported samples, Sample Recorder output, and Decompose output: ~/Documents/Steinberg/HALion 7/Export, …/Recordings, …/Decompose
I’d like to suggest a distinction that I think would make a real difference without much design work: separate user content from preferences, and only hardcode the location of the latter.
By “user content” I mean anything the user personally created or imported that has value independent of HALion itself — a WAV I recorded, a sample I built a program around, an exported layer, the output of a Decompose pass. As a concrete example: I have a trumpet sample I recorded myself that a Program depends on. That file is mine in every sense that matters — I’d want it, and expect to be able to find it, on a new machine, in a backup, or in a completely different piece of software five years from now.
By “preferences” I mean things that only make sense in the context of HALion’s own running state — which button is pinned, which panel layout I last used, internal cache/index data for MediaBay, and so on. That kind of thing genuinely belongs in ~/Library — it’s application state, not content, and no one is going to miss it if it doesn’t survive a migration.
Right now HALion doesn’t make that distinction. Presets and recorded/exported audio — content with real, standalone value — end up buried in the same general neighborhood (~/Library, or a Steinberg-specific subfolder of Documents) as low-stakes app state, with no preference in the Options Editor to point either one somewhere else. The only way around it today is a manual symlink, which works but shouldn’t be necessary for something this basic, and doesn’t survive a machine migration cleanly either — it’s one more thing to remember to recreate on the new system.
The practical cost of this is at migration and backup time. If it’s not obvious that real content lives under ~/Library, it’s easy to back up “the important stuff” (a Documents folder, a samples drive) and genuinely lose things without realizing it — a home-recorded sample, a carefully built preset — because the app hid it somewhere that doesn’t read as “my data” to begin with. ~/Library has a well-earned reputation among Mac users as the place things go to disappear; plenty of people already treat it the way Windows users treat the Registry — technically inspectable, practically a black hole. Content you made shouldn’t be filed there by default.
Concretely, what I’d ask for: a Locations page in HALion’s Options Editor where the default save target for Programs/Presets, and the default output folder for Export/Sample Recorder/Decompose, can each be set to a folder of the user’s choosing — independent of wherever HALion keeps its own preferences and cache data. Doesn’t need to be fancier than that. It doesn’t even need to change any defaults — just give people who care about this the option.
AB
Happy to hear if others have run into the same friction, especially anyone who’s been through a Mac migration with a nontrivial HALion library