Rane HAL1x Design Guide - Page 183

APPENDIX A: Transitioning from Drag Net 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. Understanding Key User Interface Differences 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. Working with Presets 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: l In Drag Net, you could recall a preset, but you could not then remove it (or un-recall it, if you will). For example, if you wanted a preset for muting the audio, you would need another preset for unmuting the audio. In the HAL System, depending on how you define your presets, you can activate a preset and then, when it is no longer needed, you can deactivate it. (To mute the system, activate the preset. To unmute the system, deactivate the preset.) The system then falls back to the next preset in the preset priority list. Whenever you activate a preset, it goes to the top of this priority list. 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. 179