Halion 1.1 > > > better then Gigastudio

[RobertKooijman]

Dear Friends,

Anyone interesting in the naked truth?

- I can run one Halion instance with several gigabyte large giga libraries TOGETHER with running Cubase all on the same PC.
- I can get over a hundred voices out of a single Halion instance TOGETHER with running Cubase all on the same PC.
- I can run several Halion instances with even more gigabites of whatever imported library TOGETHER with running Cubase all on the same PC.
- I use latencies down to 3 mS TOGETHER with running Cubase all on the same PC.
- I can import almost ANY format into Halion, using ANY sample rate and ANY resolution up to 32 bits.
- I can save ANY editing done in Halion just by saving the Cubase song.
- I can use almost ANY modulation controller to controll almost ANY parameter in real time.
- I can insert, tweak and modulate almost ANY FX or EQ in real time.
- I do NOT have to rely on a second PC.
- I am NOT in any way affiliated with Steinberg.

Anyone who states here that Halion is NOT suited for \'heavy duty\' work like large orchestrations doesn\'t know what he/she is talking about.

Halion is not perfect: there are bugs and there are crashes. But most important of all: it\'s fun and really helps making music!

PC configuration:
- Asus CUBX overclocked to 133 Mhz
- P3 800EB
- 768 MB PC133 CAS3 Infineon RAM set to 2-3-3
- RME Hammerfall 9652 digital interface
- RME EBI-8 and EBO-8 analog interfaces
- Matrox G400 DH 32 MB
- 2 WD 20 GB drives for audio
- NO SCSCI
- NO Soundblaser or equivalents
- Optimised Windows 98SE configuration


Take care, Robert

[LHong]

Agree with you, there are some advantages about integrated sampler into the Sequencer audio-MIDI and VST instruments. It seems be a great concept, it could be simply easier than try to integrate the MIDI-Audio program into the Giga-station, even if Tascam would provides a simple solution. About the giga, Onething I know the gigastudio has done greatly sample job into the accoustic sounds, which could be nearly to real-instrument. No matter somwhat technology is, that is exactly the samplers benifit to us. Of cource the huge of polyphony and easy-to-use are also important, but the sound quality also be highly concerned in order to do the job or not. It must be a reason why really we need it sampler!
If you or someone, who could simply provides the compared-DEMO songs, it would be so cool!

Well, more about Giga setup, what you were saying is correct, the system setup for Giga is more complicated. Due to the giga had totally new technology for GSIF driver, where is many software and hardware dependencies, the user must knows well his system, how to tweak it to best taking peformance. I bet you that you must deal with it same way in Cubase with HALion?
Fortunately, today the real trick is that you must have super fast CPU, huge of installed-DRAM and of course reasonable Multiple fast-harddrive, one is to dedicate for audio (ASIO/WAVE) and other HardDrive for .gig used. The key is that we know the hardware is available in the market (it wouldn\'t be realistic if we discussed this last year or so, and we did).

What is best system for Giga and how its performance?
Giga would loves fast CPU and Memory, here is the setup, which can be done at today PC technology as follows:
I\'m having the single CPU P4@2Ghz+2GB400MhzFSB+x2-UATA100+G550-32M-Video+PusarII/Scope-Soundcard system. Also, with same machine (Sonar-seq + GigaStudio160), it has about total of 105 stereo tracks, 32 MIDI-Giga tracks fully 160 voice-polyphony and more than 64 stereo audio tracks (44.1Khz/16B) + some soft-synths at same time without problem, no pop or crakle at all! The Sonar-Seq is read about 20~30% Acc-Disk and 10~25% Acc-CPU. We have two P4 systems, they are up and running well.

Anyway, We also agree with you that the HALion could makes our life easier, due to that someone has never been sucessful in gigastudio? Other advantage of HALion is that it also be supported Giga-sample, at least we don\'t need spend time and/or money on the sample\'s compatibility. So, what I see now that if it is truth, the HALion can beats GigaStudio in accoustic business, then we would think about why we still need the giga? Tascam would be more interested too?

Thanks for sharing your opinion and reading this,
Long

[This message has been edited by LHong (edited 10-09-2001).]

[gigaDiga]

Robert,

I just wanted to make it clear that this silly idea that you need two machines to work GigaStudio with a sequencer is a myth.

- I can run GigaStudio with several gigabyte large giga libraries TOGETHER with running Sonar all on the same PC.
- I can get over a hundred voices out of Gigastudio TOGETHER with running Sonar all on the same PC.
- I use latencies down to 3 mS TOGETHER with running Sonar all on the same PC.
- I do NOT have to rely on a second PC.

Agreably adding FX and saving sampler settings within the sequencer would be nice... but hey I\'ve got a pulsar so I\'ve got some major FX I can put on GigaStudio anyway. Aside from that... my system looks a little lighter than yours and, for reasons to do with free-time, I haven\'t really got round to optimising it.

- Asus CUSL-2
- P3 933
- 512 MB PC133
- Pulsar II v3
- Motherboard Graphics Chip
- 2 x 40 GB ATA100 drives
- NO SCSCI
- Motherboard Sound Chip
- non-optimised Windows 98SE configuration

[stories777]

Robert:

Halion sounds very promising!. I am particularly impressed with Halion\'s reported ability to invoke an entire sample into RAM with that slider in Options. I am into big pianos, -especially ones with 4 or more notes in each note for sympathetic resonance (HolyGrail)-, and I need something like Halion, where at least with 250 poly, I can get 250/4, or 63-note polyphonic. -One concern, is would the Grail\'s sympathetic resonance algorithm (it\'s within the HolyGrail .gig file), be successfully imported to, and run in, Halion? Pianos have GOT TO HAVE sympathetic resonance.

-How well would the Cubase32/Halion combo run under the PC\'s of say, next spring (2.5 GHz & stable RAM loads of up to 4Gig, under WinXP)? Does dual CPU help in this arena?

-This is a direction I may have to take, in order to load up a big 1.4Gig piano (all of it to RAM), rich in sympathetics, enjoy 88 note poly after sympathetics, \"set& forget\" my PC, & get playing jazz for goodness sakes, instead of endless PC tweaking...

Thanks, -Stories.

[HM]

I am a VST user who is considering
giga becouse halion has to many bugs
and steinberg close their ears to the
complaints, take a look at cubase.net
plug-in-forum and see, especially
piano and other natural stringed
instruments is unuseable due to some
kinda note-off problem. Also halion
wont work as stand alone, and in
pro setups its always smart to offer
a dedicated sampler PC I guess I have
a Celeron 950 ready anyway :-)

Halion might do something that giga
can´t, and the again many expirienced
sample-maniacs states that NO soft-
sampler has decent filters exept that
it is possible to use Reaktor filters
ina vst invirromnet

It´s a jungle

-HM

[Sam]

I haven\'t used Halion, so I can\'t compare, but my understanding is that it doesn\'t currently allow overlapping repeated notes, if true that would prohibit me from using it. And I\'ve heard the halion filters are not great, IMO the GS filters are quite good. Also I\'ve not had any crashes with later versions of GSa or GSt, for me anyway that\'s no crashes in several years of heavy use. Plus GS has first class pitch transposition, plus all the best GS libraries work perfectly on GS...

I\'m not affiliated with tascam / nemesys, and I won\'t argue that GS is a cheap solution, because the setup I run is not cheap (GS is not the only culprit here...) Competition is inevitable and will probably be good for all of us. But I don\'t currently believe halion would be the better solution for me right now. Glad you\'re happy with halion, and here\'s hoping both continue to improve.

[DJ-ARMANDO]

hi mates,today i just put the gigastudio 160 version 2.50 to my pc.i work 13 years with cubase,so i work with halion 1.1 here and 3 mounths.the big problem with the halion is the latency,so if someone let me help to make the latency more low.the gigastudio looks fine,working with no problems at my pc with cubase 5.06.

[HM]

Hi DJ A

Get rid of the damm isis-bird :-)

-HM

[cc]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by RobertKooijman:
Dear Friends,

Anyone interesting in the naked truth?
Anyone who states here that Halion is NOT suited for \'heavy duty\' work like large orchestrations doesn\'t know what he/she is talking about.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Pardon a poor skeptic, but the laws of physics indicate that it is impossible for Halion ever to achieve the same type of perfomance on a given (properly configured) machine than can GS.

Consider a new, average piano patch: stereo, chromatically sampled with 8 velocity layers (4 pedal up, 4 pedal down) and no release triggering.

This equates to about 2*77*8 = 1232 samples that need to be loaded. In GS, this will require approx 77 MB of RAM to pre-load. (1232 * 64 / 1024).

In Halion, pre-buffering only 2 seconds, the same will require approx 212 MB to pre-load.
(1232 * 2 * 2 * 44.1 / 1024).

Not only does it take almost 3 times as long to load in Halion, it requires almost 3 times the amount of space (this is if pre-buffering is set to 2 sec).

So how do you expect that several huge orchestral patches (e.g. garritan strings, dan dean woodwinds) can actually be played simultaneously from Halion in , uhm, *only* 1GB of RAM?

And now we are not even getting into the impossibility of user-mode software being able to read the hard drive with the same performance as a real-time kernel-mode system, for streaming these huge patches.

Yes, there are many advantages to running a sampler as plug-in inside a sequencer. But being able to deal with huge orchestral sample libraries is not yet one of them. And even when it becomes so, GS on the same platform will always be able to deliver more raw performance.

[David Abraham]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by cc:

Yes, there are many advantages to running a sampler as plug-in inside a sequencer. But being able to deal with huge orchestral sample libraries is not yet one of them. And even when it becomes so, GS on the same platform will always be able to deliver more raw performance.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Probably the most important point IMO, for large MIDI orchestrations GigaStudio is unmatched, but for contextual sample playback in the context of pop song or light MIDI/heavy audio production, a plugin sampler is superior.

-david abraham

[Alan]

Don\'t forget,Halion is competing with your track amount running in the same program,no thanks.

[David Abraham]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Alan:
Don\'t forget,Halion is competing with your track amount running in the same program,no thanks.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

everything in a digital audio sequencer is competing, that\'s nothing new. In the early days MIDI sequencers and audio recorders were separate apps that had to be synced, then they were integrated but with no good effects so we ran multi-channel output to hardware mixers...then good effects came and we could run these in realtime on the same system. So integrated synthesis/sampling is just another step on this journey. On a modern CPU it\'s absolutely worth the effort for many projects. In a matter of months the CPU power will go up another order of magnitude as Intel/AMD move to .13 micron.

That doesn\'t mean there won\'t be a significant market for standalone software. Digital Audio Sequencers don\'t make products like Vegas, Samplitude and SAWStudio irrelevant. At the same time Audio Sequencers + plugin synths should not be summarily dismissed, because for goodness sakes they work, and they work well.

-david abraham

[Alan]

I\'m just saying that for the time being Halion would be the straw that broke the camels back with all the VSTi and plugs I\'m already running compared to giga.I run Giga in the same machine on another card seperate from my main audio card which seems to make all the difference in the world for me.