The Halion Sonic 1.5 upgrade destroys some effects

Virtual instruments
#1

During the first days with Halion Sonic 1.0 I started playing with the editor and created two multi program presets. Both use the “Phaser Suitcase” preset, adding a Reverence instance in the global inserts.

Now, it happens the following: when I start Halion Sonic right after a reboot and I select the Phaser Suitcase alone, it works fine - in particular, the Phaser insert that is configured works. When I select one of my multi program presets, the phaser disappears, as well as other inserts (and the global Reverence). From now on, even selecting the Phaser Suitcase alone, the inserts don’t work. Note that I still see them, I can open their editor and play with it, but it doesn’t have any effect.

It’s worrying - not only this defeats the quality of patches, but I’m worried about loosing some subtler editing item whose absence could be not so obvious to spot.

Running on Snow Leopard on a Mac Mini. Please let me know how to fix.

#2

More information:

  1. It happens most of the times, but not always (let’s say 9 times out of 10)
  2. It happens on both my installations (MacBook Pro 64bit, Mac Mini 32 bit; both running Mac OS X 10.6.6)
  3. It doesn’t involve all the effects: for instance, the Phaser and Reverence don’t work, while Reverb does
  4. In one case in which it was working, at a certain point Sonic chocked (as when there’s no more CPU, but I had iStat running and in that moment both CPUs were at 50%) and when it restarted playing the effects were gone
  5. I don’t know whether it’s related, but on one installation (the MacBook Pro) I’ve also lost all my custom ratings (not happy of that, I’ve spent some hours exploring the presets; ratings are still present on the other installation, where are they stored?).
#3

:confused: Hmm, can’t confirm! Can you perhaps provide a multi program preset that won’t work for you?

K4

#4

Yes, I can. Indeed I tried to attach to my previous post, but the forum software didn’t accept the extension. Is it ok to attach a zip with the stuff inside?

#5

Try that! :wink:

#6

Here we go. I’ve attached a .zip with both the multi program and a short screencast in which I show how it’s easy to trigger the problem. The screencast hasn’t been edited or cut (only compressed down to fit the attachment size limit). The things I’ve done:

  1. Launch Halion Sonic.
  2. Select my Multi program.
  3. Start playing (randomly with the mouse).
  4. Briefly checked the load status on my laptop (there is something running in background sucking some CPU, a thing that I don’t think is always happening).
  5. Return to Halion Sonic and keep on playing.
  6. Set the “solo” option for the elec piano (this is not required to reproduce the bug, it’s only more clear to me to hear the sound).
  7. Keep on playing randomly…
  8. … until Halion Sonic gets stuck. Note that the Halion CPU indicator is just a bit past halfway, the CPU doesn’t seem completely allocated.
  9. After a few seconds Halion resumes playing, but as you can hear the effects have gone away.
    bug.zip (1.46 MB)