I certainly can appreciate a desire for that type of sound design planning, prep, and work flow…particularly from the perspective of a sound designer who sits down with intent to build a complete instrument and possibly even market that as a product in its own right. If I were into that sort of thing, I’d probably have considered H5 as a third or fourth choice rather than my 1st, and to me it’d be more about the lack of sfz support (and a variety of other industry standard exportable formats). It’d certainly make sense to add these capabilities if they want more developers using the Halion engine to build and share libraries on a larger scale. Heck, they could even make it a developers expansion pack and charge a little more for those features (and maybe give a price cut to the current feature set to make it a more competitive option).
If I had to choose between being able to import/export sfz, and having a built in sampler environment…I’d personally rather have sfz I have at least two dozen apps here capable of making and editing high quality samples, tagging, and organizing them (many of them free, or really inexpensive). What I don’t have is a quick and easy way to export an open, non-proprietary patch that I can share with other educators under free licenses on free players. I suppose I could spring for something like a ChickenSystems dev package if that’s what I really wanted…and well…that cost as much H5 and from what little I piddled with it, it’s not as easy, powerful, or as much fun.
I tend to take a different approach to sound design, and H5 rocks in this regard. Rather than trying to anticipate every need and build a massive patch that can handle anything I might care to throw at it ‘in the future’…I just build what I need on the fly. Don’t like the articulation of that trumpet phrase? I pause long enough to build exactly what I need and keep it simple. It’s not uncommon for me to make a quick and simple patch for a 6 bar phrase that might never ever be used again. I stop ‘composing’ just long enough to fashion what I need to match what my imagination wants to accomplish. Sometimes it’s with real acoustical instruments…others it might be a mix-mesh of other synth sounds I happened to capture almost by accident in ‘jam, or experimentation’ sessions.
With articulate orchestral arrangements and the individual instruments required to build those, my way isn’t terribly practical…a serious arranger in that respect is naturally going to want a really robust library at hand, that he knows from top to bottom (so he can find things) that’s all ready to go. He has a dozen or more choices out there of folks publishing high end libraries.
H5 kind of fills a hole in the market for spontaneous sound design (Jazz, Pop, HipHop, Dance, Movie and Game sound tracks, etc.). I.E. The kind of folks who like to sit at the DAW and play into the thing with a guitar, wind jammer, the human voice, or whatever…then use that material for further inspiration on down the line. The average DAW user already knows how to hit record in the DAW, and highlight bits of a track he wants to turn into some sort of component for an instrument in something like H5 or GA4.
Even though it’s quite capable of doing it…H5 may well have a ways to go before it really grabs the attention of developers trying the capture the intense range of expression in things like wind and bowed string instruments; however, if more people into improv styles of music making sat down and played with a CuBase/Nuendo/H5/GA4 setup, I think Steinberg could easily capture a good chunk of that market. The fact you don’t have to set up a ‘sampler section’, or go through 4 different work flows and file systems to create or open samples, slice, loop, layer, process, and trigger is great for that sort of ‘on the fly’ sound designer.