If you are moving from the Drag Net world to the HAL System world, your transition will be smoother if you read through this topic. Explained below are some of the key differences between the two systems.
As a Drag Net user, you're accustomed to using a Processing Map to design your system. You'll be glad to know that this concept lives on in the Halogen software—but there's now more! Not only is there a Processing Map, there is also a Hardware Map.
note: The Processing Map is part of a larger area of the user interface known as the Processing Workspace. The same is true for the Hardware Map, which is part of a larger area known as the Hardware Workspace.
As the name suggests, you select and configure your hardware devices in the Hardware Workspace while you use the Processing Workspace to select and configure your inputs and outputs, configure the processing you want, and set up the appropriate audio flow.
As a Drag Net user, you're also used to working with a Remote Map for setting up control linking. Halogen does not contain a Remote Map. Instead, you configure your control links directly in the Processing Workspace. These differences are explained more thoroughly below.
The handling of presets is perhaps the area that has changed the most between the two systems. A key result of these differences is a significant reduction in the need for presets in the HAL System. Whereas in Drag Net, control linking, paging, and room combining required the use of presets, this requirement does not exist in Halogen. You will now use presets primarily to dictate how the audio is processed. Ironically, although presets are required less often in Halogen, you can create many more of them than you could in Drag Net (which has a preset limit of 24). You can also now customize your preset names, which you could not do in Drag Net.
Another key difference centers on how presets are turned on. In Drag Net, you would recall a preset. In Halogen and the HAL System, there are some new terms for this process—because there are new ways of performing this function. This Help System contains detailed explanations of working with presets in the HAL System, but, for you Drag Net users, we'll mention some of the key differences here:
A HAL System feature that makes this preset behavior possible and viable is its Baseline preset—another new concept for you Drag Net users (although it has some similarity in functionality to Drag Net's Preset Zero). The Baseline preset, which is automatically created for you but can be customized by you, contains all the blocks you have included in your audio system. It provides the foundation, the fallback position, for your system. Therefore, when you deactivate a preset, there is always a configuration for the system to fall back to.
tip: As a Drag Net user, were you often tempted to include every relevant block in every preset, even if the preset didn't change a value in the block—just to be sure of every parameter value when recalling the preset? Rest assured that, in the HAL System, this practice is not necessary. You should include in a preset, only those blocks containing a parameter value to be changed by the preset.
tip: Our advice to you? Read the details on preset types and working with presets before getting started with your design!
You're going to love configuring control links in Halogen! The process has been simplified and streamlined. Following are some of the key differences:
Configuring your HAL System remote devices is much simpler than in Drag Net. Following are a few reasons:
Remember the Automixer/Ducker block in Drag Net? Such a beast does not exist in Halogen. Instead, Halogen offers some terrific new blocks that combine to accomplish the same applications of the Drag Net Automixer/Ducker block, but with far simpler configuration and vastly superior features. These blocks include: