It obviously sounds fantastic. The amount of ultra-high quality raw material to program your own sounds is truly mind-boggling. There is a wide variety of sounds, ranging from the traditional to the outer reaches of sonic exploration. You can create your onw sounds a number of ways. If you're used to Atmosphere, there is a window which is quite similar where you can mix two patches. Now take that and multiply it by eight channels! Yikes. The possibilities for layering are mind-boggling but I doubt that there are many computers that could handle the load. There are new effects, an arpeggiator...it can become overwhelming pretty quickly.
On the 'down' side, although I have a modern PC (Q6600, 4 gigs of RAM, etc.) even the smallest patches always will exhibit a click or pop eventally regardless of the setting I've tried on the plugin. I'm sure that there's some heavy synthesis going on underneath the small samples that are loaded, but I can't see why a 12 meg patch would cause massive CPU spikes no matter what is going on. I've also had a couple of crashes and several times when the plugin just stopped its audio output. I guess it ran out of STEAM
Hopefully this will be addressed in the near future with an update. I would say that its weakest sounds were the Rhodes and Hammond-oriented sounds. They could have left those out completely, IMO.Just for grins, I immediately loaded Cakewalk Rapture after toying around with Omnisphere. In terms of its general sonic quality, I would say that it is Omnisphere's equal and it also provides fertile ground for easily programming your own patches. Although Rapture doesn't ship 50 gigs of killer waveforms (Omnisphere is a closed system), it will allow you to load any wave file and use that for the basis of its synthesis. Rapture is a 6-channel instrument where Omnisphere is a 16-channel instrument. Rapture his very easy on the CPU.
Do I like Omnisphere? Yes. Will it make me get rid of Rapture, Dimension Pro, Thor, Zebra? No. We really have an embarrasment of riches these days!
