Is Halion sort of Kontakt or Reaktor with plugins or libraries in its own format?

 

Yes both, but I think not as low level as reaktor. The synthesize methodes are fixed (and new ones added, with new versions). With reaktor you can create new methodes yourself. libraries can be synth based or sample based or a mixture. And you can build your own.

 

Halion is closer to kontakt than Reaktor.
At the core, both are samplers but with the years, each product has been adding many features not necessarily sampler related (think of new filters and synthesis methods).

Kontakt is the obvious market leader but Halion is far from being ridiculous. In its latest version, it seems like it added additional synthesis and modeling methods.

 

What are the differences between Halion & Halion Sonic ?

 

What I know, Kontakt is loaded with bloody heavy libraries. It is actually thought as a sample player (awesome Razor is a look-like synth plugin). Reaktor looks lighter with real synthesizer plugins mostly.

How about Reason or Omnisphere?

Can I create a Halion plugins like for Reaktor?

 

HALion is actually closest in function to UVI Falcon, both have an underlying semimodular synthesis and sampling architecture that can make a library with a macro page, and store their libraries in monolithic files. Kontakt doesn’t have a same architecture and Reaktor is fully modular with the ability to easily create nearly anything with it’s available pieces.

The most I can say about the available tone generation is that Falcon has more options and is more flexible but HALion s likely better for samples and wavetable editing, and has better fm oscillator with more than four operators. Don’t know about MPE but it’s fully supported in Falcon but native instruments might not support much other than poly after touch, I know Padshop has mpe support, not sure about HALion

if I had to pick Kontakt or Reaktor vs HALion I’d probably pick Reaktor cause it’s the smallest with libraries and the first party libraries like Rounds and Molekular are pretty good, plus there’s the whole Blocks side

 

Think one is made for performance and the other for deep editing and creation, both load the same kinda of libraries and factory patches but Sonic is a rhythm section away from being an arranger keyboard plugin