No preview sound from HALion Sonic in media browser after reinstallation

After a drive crash I have made a reinstallation of everything on a new main drive. Windows 10, Cubase 11 Pro, HALion Sonic. All of it installed on the same drive with default locations via Steinberg Download Assistance. Seems to got it all working again except for one annoying thing - I have no preview sound from HALion Sonic instruments when browsing in MediaBay or Media Rack. When the HS-instrument is dragged in to a project track it works fine. HS also works fine as standalone outside Cubase. I have preview sound in MediaBay from the other VST-instruments (GrooveAgent, Retrolouge, Padshop, Mystic etc) but not from HALion Sonic. I have made a second reinstallation of both Cubase and HALion Sonic but the problem remain. What is wrong?

1 Like

Just tested this and I actually have the exact same problem : I can ‘preview’, either in MediaBay or in the Media Rack all the vstpresets used with GA SE5, Padshop, Retrologue, but NOT the ones used by Halion Sonic (I have Halion Sonic 7, here, not Halion Sonic SE, but the libraries used are basically the same). The preview works in all other cases, even and surprisingly, with my VSTi 2.4 third party ones for which i made vstpresets.

This, using the on-screen keyboard (I have another issue, actually : my MIDI keyboard isn’t recognized by MediaBay, though perfectly working in the Arrange and MixConsole views, but it’s another point…). And contrarily to you, I didn’t have to reinstall anything, so I don’t think it’s related.

I am investigating and will report back here, if I find something useful…

Still haven’t found something that could help, but it seems that we aren’t the only ones with the same issue (just found it, testing different related key words in the forum ‘Search’ feature)…

None of the HALion VST Instruments will preview - Cubase - Steinberg Forums

Beside this, another symptom : when attempting to preview a Halion Sonic vstpreset, clicking on a key in the on-screen keyboard, the MIDI activity light in the preview section remains dead, contrarily to what’s happening with the other instruments that I have at disposal. So, it seems that the MIDI message generated by it doesn’t reach Halion Sonic, for a reason…

Thanks for your replies. Yes, it seems like there are more having the same problem. And maybe it´s related to HALion Sonic 7. I have not had this issue whith previous versions of HS.

I have MIDI activity indication and my hardware MIDI keyboard works overall well in MediaBay.

Seems to be an issue with HALion Sonic 7. I uninstalled HS 7 and reinstalled HS 3 and now the preview works. I think I will wait for an update of HS 7 before installing that again.

1 Like

Good to know, thanks ! :slightly_smiling_face:

Actually, I don’t remember if the preview function was working with HS SE 3 on my end, as I usually was directly loading presets from the VSTi UI, when I was using it, which wasn’t often the case.

Now, let’s see if there will be an acknowledgement from Steinberg in a way or another…

I have the exact same issue!
I can listen to my VSTs in the main mix, and even in Mediabay’s loop section. But from the right hand dashboard it simply is not active…
For some reason it used to work and then suddenly it disappeared

Heya, lovely audio people!

I’m running into the same issue with Cubase Artist 12.0.70 and Halion 7.0.20 on MacOS 12. Tried various things to fix it, but so far nothing worked.

An older installation on a different machine that still has Cubase 12.0.40, no Halion 7 and the older Halion presets (compatible with 3.50) works fine however. So it seems that copying these over and deleting the Halion 7 plugin from Cubase should fix the issue.

Still, I would highly prefer an official fix for this. So I’m writing these lines, hoping that Steinberg will look into it. Or maybe someone from the community has found a solution in the meantime that I’m just not aware of yet? While the bug is not critical, it is highly annoying, as I like to use the MediaBay to quickly look for synth sounds that fit my projects.

I don’t have a third machine that would be able to run Cubase 12, so I can’t try what a completely fresh installation would result in.

Best greetings
Dasha