Oops, I took the ‘without a DAW’ to mean it was in stand alone. Yes, side-chain is the way to get things into HALion from inside a DAW. If you have a DAW that allows it, sometimes it can be a little easier and more flexible to run HALion in the effect slot of a ‘group bus’ set to quad or surround sound instead of as a VSTi. I sometimes wonder why HALion doesn’t ship with a VST effect slot variant of the plugin as well…
Since I use Cubase most of the time, I rarely sample directly into HALion anyway. HALion and Cubase pretty much meld into a common instrument that’s easy to drag and drop information between. However, I understand there are times when it does make sense to sample directly into HALion…particularly for making short wavetables.
For a DAW that cannot do the side-chain thing at all, which also prohibits running a VSTi in a quad/surround group (or doesn’t have group buses at all), I’d personally use Bidule and run HALion inside Bidule from a VST Mixer effect slot on an Aux Send channel instead of as a VSTi. Bidule gives me the tools I’d need to wire up different audio streams to the input pins of HALion, and having it on an Aux Send bus makes it easier to route different signal in there.
A trick I often use for major sound design projects in CuBase (should work in any DAW with instant render, and drag and drop support) is to host HALion on a dedicated ‘instrument track’. That makes it pretty simple to arm/monitor/mute/solo/etc. and route from one spot. I’ll keep ‘song data’ off the track.
For the task of ‘re sampling’ an entire VSTi plugin or something…
In a dedicated CuBase project, I’ll make a sampling template in the MIDI editor of the instrument track that automates the process of playing each note I want to sample at different precise velocities, with a few seconds between each to allow for things like release times and tail samples.
Next, I’ll instant render the track. It gets rendered into a pure audio track, which is then easy to slice, dice, polish with fully rendered effects, and touch edit into nondestructive events/parts on the tracks/lanes with the DAW before moving (drag and drop right onto a zone map, exactly where I want it) into HALion. I still have my MIDI part(s) on the HALion instrument track as reference points for quickly locking cursor points and such.
For some things, I’d rather work with the DAW sample editor anyway. I can buff and polish the samples a bit before I bring them into a Sampler for looping, cross-fading, and other micro-level edits of that nature.
Once I’ve got my rendered track edited, sliced, and diced, I drag it directly on the zone map where it belongs in HALion, set up loops and cross-fades, and it’s pretty much done other than fine tuning db levels (if necessary), which I’d wait until I’ve got all the samples in the instrument to do anyway.
Until I force otherwise (by exporting the samples, or running some kind of destructive/frozen edit inside HALion), technically the source of all the samples in HALion is still in one long audio file, and there’s no doubt that it’s located in the Project’s audio folder. HALion has features to automatically slice it into multiple samples, process, pack, tag, and rename things when it comes time to either export the sound as a preset with raw samples, or pack it into a vstsound library.