I am doing a rather huge orchestral project and loving every minute of using Dorico for this task - except now it seems I’ve added a couple of instruments too many for the Halion engine to handle. There are now 4 full instances of Halion with 16 voices each, and a half-full fifth instance. When I now try to add more instruments they are simply silent…! The three latest players or sections I have added simply does not make one sound.
I wasn’t really going to create this many players, but had to do a workaround, since some flows have divisi voices and some don’t. For instance: I both created a flute “section”, and three different flute solo players. I don’t know if this affects the sound, or if I could simply have chose one of the “solo players” to use as the “section” in the flows where all three flute players are playing the same voice. But then I would also have to rename them individually per flow, so that if there is only one flute voice in the flow, it is not called “Flute 1”. Thus, the solution of creating both sections AND solo players seemed like the best one - until I ran out of voices.
Have I hit a “limit” of too many Halion instruments? Is there some way to fix this - and rather quickly, since my deadline is fast approaching?
Also, on that Options page, have a look for the Multi Core option. Is it set to 1? Try also here different settings and see if that makes a change. Btw, the Multi Core option is global and affects all HALion instances.
Hi, thanks for the tips! Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to change anything. I tried changing the multi-core options from 1 to 3 cores.
Halion also says available memory (physical) is 3.14 of 31.81 GB, and available memory (virtual) is 13.14 GB of 31.81 GB.
I’m nowhere near the set Max Preload limit of 1200 MB - Used Preload is 374 MB.
This is when “balance” is set to center, but turning it either way doesn’t seem to change things dramatically.
I don’t think it’s the “max voices” since the newly created channels don’t even make a sound when played in solo. I have a trombone section and a tuba section that I created recently in the project. They do not even make a sound when I click on the note in Write mode, like all the other instruments do. So there is simply no sound from the newly created channels…
Would it be possible that you send us your project, so that we can have a look?
If so, please send to ‘u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de’.
It goes without saying that we’d keep it strictly confidential.
And another follow-up: When I continued to add instruments, they were no longer assigned to HALion slots, so all new instruments stayed silent until I actively assigned them myself in Play mode. (Maybe this is a bug?)
This was however fixed by another tip from Ulf: Going to Play Mode, and choosing from the menu Play > Apply Default Playback Template. This managed to “clean up” the project so that I could continue adding new instruments which were correctly assigned. Hurray!
This is intentional behaviour. Dorico’s playback model is that it will keep the HALion contents up to date if you add new instruments to the score. However if you make any changes to the routing or the sounds loaded in HALion then this turns off the automatic loading. The reason is that it prevents Dorico from overwriting a change that you have made manually to your VST setup. If you select Apply Default Template then this resets everything back to the automatic mode.
I never intentionally changed the routings before this started happening to my project. But it’s probably the only explanation, that I might somehow have done it without meaning to do so.
