sybernut
01-17-2003, 12:44 AM
My laptop-based studio is slowly coming together, but a few things still puzzle me, issues which could impact a decision to go with Halion or Giga.
Halion seems to be a VST plugin, which seems to give a more streamlined top-down studio organization. Can Giga also function as a (VST or WDM/DirectX) plugin? If it does, wouldn\'t its mixer be redundant in some cases, leading to useless latency?
One review states that you must integrate Halion with Cubase of Nuendo as VST host in order to take advantage of Halion\'s multitimbral/multioutput features... this bugs me \'cos it seems like a marketing ploy to sell more Steinberg products (quality aside). Can Giga be integrated into any top-level \'host\' environment of the same calibre and still deliver all of its features?
Another reviewer wishes that Giga allowed VST plug-ins instead of their NFX effects gear... I agree, who needs yet another \'standard\'. If Giga can function as a plug-in, this may not be an issue as effects may be pluggable into Giga outputs.
Another review says that the use of MIDI USB adapters is not recommended with Giga, due to inherent USB latency: I understand that physical mixers shouldn\'t use USB, but MIDI link bandwidth is very slow compared with USB bandwidth... why should this be an issue?
In brief, I need to hook up the following components together:
(a) USB MIDI ports OR MIDI sequencer with music notation support (switchable btwn the 2). The MIDI ports will eventually hook into a master controller, I\'ll just use a little MIDI Casio for now.
hooked into
(b) software sampler: Halion w/o mixer or Giga with mixer, Giga effects not essential (i.e. Giga96 will do: anyway, apparently Giga160 reverts to 96 when it detects e.g. q sequencer in the computer)
hooked into
(c) effects, and a mixer if Halion is used (both provided by e.g. Cubase SL if Halion is used).
hooked via ASIO or some other SW-HW interface into
(d) Echo Audio Mona
Digital audio inputs from the Mona must also be supported as mixer inputs e.g. in (c)
The \'top-level\' in this is perhaps best implemented by a \'MIDI/digital-audio sequencer: I assume Cubase SL, Cakewalk SONAR or some other app would do the trick, right? It would be ideal if this choice could wait: how can I just hook up these components (minus mixer in the Halion case) without such an app (i.e. with a simple notation-supporting sequencer in (a) instead, such as a 10-year-old Cakewalk that I still have)? This would already give enough of a load on the computer to test it properly.
Sorry for the length of the post. Your input on this would be most welcome.
regards,
Sy
images/icons/shocked.gif
Halion seems to be a VST plugin, which seems to give a more streamlined top-down studio organization. Can Giga also function as a (VST or WDM/DirectX) plugin? If it does, wouldn\'t its mixer be redundant in some cases, leading to useless latency?
One review states that you must integrate Halion with Cubase of Nuendo as VST host in order to take advantage of Halion\'s multitimbral/multioutput features... this bugs me \'cos it seems like a marketing ploy to sell more Steinberg products (quality aside). Can Giga be integrated into any top-level \'host\' environment of the same calibre and still deliver all of its features?
Another reviewer wishes that Giga allowed VST plug-ins instead of their NFX effects gear... I agree, who needs yet another \'standard\'. If Giga can function as a plug-in, this may not be an issue as effects may be pluggable into Giga outputs.
Another review says that the use of MIDI USB adapters is not recommended with Giga, due to inherent USB latency: I understand that physical mixers shouldn\'t use USB, but MIDI link bandwidth is very slow compared with USB bandwidth... why should this be an issue?
In brief, I need to hook up the following components together:
(a) USB MIDI ports OR MIDI sequencer with music notation support (switchable btwn the 2). The MIDI ports will eventually hook into a master controller, I\'ll just use a little MIDI Casio for now.
hooked into
(b) software sampler: Halion w/o mixer or Giga with mixer, Giga effects not essential (i.e. Giga96 will do: anyway, apparently Giga160 reverts to 96 when it detects e.g. q sequencer in the computer)
hooked into
(c) effects, and a mixer if Halion is used (both provided by e.g. Cubase SL if Halion is used).
hooked via ASIO or some other SW-HW interface into
(d) Echo Audio Mona
Digital audio inputs from the Mona must also be supported as mixer inputs e.g. in (c)
The \'top-level\' in this is perhaps best implemented by a \'MIDI/digital-audio sequencer: I assume Cubase SL, Cakewalk SONAR or some other app would do the trick, right? It would be ideal if this choice could wait: how can I just hook up these components (minus mixer in the Halion case) without such an app (i.e. with a simple notation-supporting sequencer in (a) instead, such as a 10-year-old Cakewalk that I still have)? This would already give enough of a load on the computer to test it properly.
Sorry for the length of the post. Your input on this would be most welcome.
regards,
Sy
images/icons/shocked.gif