Halion vs. Giga

[dantonio]

I heard that Steinberg\'s new Halion sampler (vst instrument) is just like giga except runs on both a Mac and a PC. I run a mac protools/ logic sustem and would rather add a new dedicated mac sampler than a pc one.

Can you think of any reason why Halion is not the way to go?

[paynterr]

My view is that although GS has a head start of a few years, its team was pathetically small (3 people) from what I can gleam, and although it has now been bought out by Tascam and will no doubt have enlarged somewhat, the whole philosophy of not integrating into an existing virtual studio such as VST is a killer longer term, I believe.
Sure - GS will have better latency (for now) but give it a year or two and I really think that the latency issue will disappear as hardware gets quicker etc. and people will demand an integrated environment.
Right now, GS still has the edge since Halion is not quite mature... although people will probably tell you that it is... but stay tuned and give it a couple of months, because it is catching up VERY quickly... Tascam have something to worry about I believe and better do something about it... of cause Tascam have a massive market in hardware, so perhaps, of course, they simply don\'t care??? Who knows what their reason was for buying Gigasampler? It could simply have been a marketing exercise to remove it from the market. I hope not.
The bottom line is that Halion is fully integrated into mac/pc cubase and imports gigastudio sample library formats. I am waiting until the next major release when I will probably \"give it a go\" and download an evaluation copy if they have one. I rather like the idea of my sampler being a VSTi...
In my mind, what GS did was to open up the market to sampler library developers to create large and powerful libraries... what sampler you use beyond that is rather irrelevant I would have thought, thus I\'m all for a new market leader that gives me my required integration.
Hope helps.
This is a very flame-worthy email. I don\'t dislike GS at all... I just like the approach of Steinberg...

[plumsmooth]

Can someone talk about 32 bit please-- that is what Halion claims as internal resolution. what does that mean in a world where 24 bit monitoring is the most you can expect. If both were free and you were shifting from Pro Tools LE (001) to Nuendo with an RME ADI8DS would you build a dual processor (pc) to run GIGA and record on MAC G4 400-- or would you just get rid of MAC and run both Nuendo and Halion on the same system?-- with dual AMD XP 1900mhz processing. Or connect them all with the new nuendo software and virtual terminal to connect all computers!!!

[pantonality]

Well I understand that Mac users are usually loath to venture to the dark side, however this issue recently came up in the Logic users group and it seemed the consensus there was buy a separate PC for Giga. Here\'s why.

The primary issue is compatibility with Giga libraries. There is a significant number of libraries that have been developed for Giga that take advantage of features not available or porrly supported in Halion. You\'d be on the bleeding edge running Giga libraries on Halion.

Giga\'s streaming from disk technology is very powerful and allows massive libraries. However that means the disk drive works hard, if you\'re recording digital audio and doing processing on the same machine you\'re asking a lot of one critical component. I realize you mentioned adding a dedicated Mac, but I thought I\'d mention that for the benefit of any copnsidering adding Halion to a Mac DAW.

So the primary issue is compatibility with Giga files. Giga being PC only will for the foreseeable future be the leader on the PC platform. I run Logic and haven\'t bothered with EXS24 and won\'t because I\'ve got Giga. I don\'t need the headaches of trying to make that system work with the libraries I have when I already have Giga on a separate machine.

Cheers,

Steve http://www.mp3.com/stevechandler (\"http://www.mp3.com/stevechandler\")
aka Ettienne http://www.mp3.comettienne (\"http://www.mp3.comettienne\")