MAC

Steinberg To Ship HALion 2
Company also announces new instruments and plugins
by David Nagel
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(Mar. 05, 2003) -- Steinberg says it will ship a major update to HALion, the company's virtual sampler for VST, beginning in April. Version 2.0 gains new filters and enhanced 5.1 functionality and will support Windows and Mac OS X. The company has also annonced new instruments and plugins for VST. All of the new products are being shown this week at the Musikmesse Festival in Frankfurt.

HALion 2.0 gains new filters by Waldorf and enhanced 5.1 surround functionality, including a variety of new material by Wizoo. New Waldorf filters include 12 dB and 24 dB Low Pass, 12 dB and 24 dB Hi Pass, Band Pass and Notch. It also gains new workflow features, such as the ability to save settings as presets and load them for envelopes. It also gains a new feature called Step Envelope, a configurable modulation source designed for rhythmic progressions. It now also supports new sample formats, including Roland S770 and GIGA sample libraries

HALion 2.0 will be available in April for $449.99. Updates will be available free for users of HALion 1.0. It supports VST in Mac OS X and VST and DXi in Windows.

Steinberg has also announced three other new pieces of software: Groove Agent, Xphrase and the Steinberg Waldorf Edition. Groove Agent is a VST instrument that acts as a "virtual drummer," according to Steinberg. It can play live, dynamic drums using an internal sound library. It will support VST and will be available for Mac OS X and Windows in April for $249.99. Further information was not available at press time.

Xphrase is a sample-based VST instrument that combines sound shaping and polyphonic phrase creation. It offers drag and drop support for phrasing, along with real-time controllers and sound mingling tools built around an integrated polyphonic phrase generator. Features include:

Four-part multi-timbral polyphonic phrase synthesizer;
Full loop and tempo-sync capability;
Each Timbre consists of: Phrase Oscillator (32 cells) with individual note resolution, amp section and multimode filter (low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and notch filters with 12-72 dB slopes) with freeform loopable envelopes, two additional freeform loopable auxiliary envelopes, two freeform LFOs, arpeggiator and unison mode.;
Each Phrase Oscillator contains an individual waveform per cell, plus a maximum of six freely assignable cell parameters, such as pitch, cutoff, resonance, pan, level and gate-time;
Includes a pool of 256 preset phrases and 256 user phrases;
Imports AIFF and Wave samples;
32-bit floating-point resolution, 192 kHz sample rate, and 1,024 voices/notes (256 per timbre);
Four assignable stereo outputs with vector synthesis;
Integrated mouse-controllable keyboard and wheels.
Xphrase will be available in May for Mac OS X and WIndows for $249.99. It will support VST, DXi and Audio Units.

FInally, Steinberg has also released the Steinberg Waldorf Edition, a collection of plugins that includes three individual modules: Waldorf Attack, a virtual analog drum synthesizer; D-Pole, an audio effects tool with a delay section, overdrive, LFO and sample rate reduction capabilities; and PPG Wave 2.V, a VST adaptation of the wavetable instrument by Wolfgang Palm. Steinberg Waldorf Edition will be available this month for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Windows for $249.99.