Steinberg has announced a new symphonic VST instrument and library: HALion Symphonic Orchestra.
A 27GB library, integrated easy-to-use player, RealAmbience adjustable
recorded reverb and range of playability features combine to form a new
orchestral composition and production tool.

?€œHALion Symphonic Orchestra is without doubt one of the
best-sounding and most playable instruments of its kind,?€ comments
Helge Vogt, Steinberg?€™s Product Manager for Virtual Instruments.
?€œWe?€™ve paid a lot of attention to making these exquisitely detailed
instruments and articulations easy to find, parameters easy to tweak
and the interface easy to navigate. This product doesn?€™t just offer
top-quality content, but unlike most competing products, it makes those
instruments really playable,?€ he continues.

Played by a leading European orchestra, the expansive 27GB HSO
library encompasses a vast array of articulations for strings,
woodwind, brass and percussion including crescendo, decrescendo,
accents, half and whole tone thrills, bowing (where applicable),
portamento, pizzicato, expressivo and many more. 1250 programs offer
solo, ensemble and tutti sounds for almost every instrument, with
innovatively programmed facilities like key-switches and crossfades
providing easy use of complex sample groups.

An innovative feature first developed for HALion String Edition 2,
RealAmbience adds the real reverb tails of the included instruments
which were recorded live after the instrument stopped playing. The
RealAmbience control dynamically and discretely blends in these
additional samples as desired, recreating a genuine concert hall inside
modern computer-based production environments.

HSO includes a range of performance optimization features from
Steinberg?€™s award-winning HALion 3 sampler, including the advanced
disk streaming system and RAMSave technology, which allows unneeded
samples to be unloaded from RAM, further saving precious system
resources. To offer users a direct choice between top quality and
player performance every one of the 15,000 unique samples is included
in both 24-bit and 16-bit versions. Many of the HSO programs are also
included as ECO versions, for even further optimized performance.

Supported Formats

Supporting VST, DXi, AU as well as ReWire for easy integration into
Pro Tools, HALion Symphonic Orchestra also offers a stand-alone mode
capable of playing out to multiple outputs.