Omnisphere 2.6 announced at NAMM [RELEASED 27-03-19]

[beely]

I would imagine that Eric Persing recreated Fantasia, Soundtrack, Digital Native Dance... sound-alike patches with Omnisphere's soundsources and synthesis.

Possibly, but I would imagine his desire to recreate D50 presets would not be that great, based on what he's said in the past. New, D-50 inspired sounds with some of that character, sure.

The way hardware profiles typically work is that when you choose waveforms, or filter types etc on the hardware, Omnisphere follows on so you get predictable control. I can't imagine that you'd select a particular PCM wave in the D50/editor you wouldn't get at least something comparable out of Omnisphere.

Anyway, we'll find out in March...

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I went through the D50 Roland Cloud plugin last night, and I already hear a lot of similar style patches in Omnisphere. So I'm speculating that Eric sampled some of the original waveforms from the PCM section of the synth and that's what's being included in Omnisphere. So maybe not 1:1 absolute/patch recreations (we already have the Cloud version for that), but perhaps remastered versions of those waves that allow for some very good, and authentic D50 sounds within Omnisphere, combined with Eric's patch programing abilities.

[Trancit]

synapse audio would make a dune 4 out of this

spectrasonics kick A**!!!!

Given to the initial costs I wouldn´t blame Synapse Audio for not giving away everything for free...

If I charge 4 times more at the beginning it´s easy to be "generous" afterwards... but it´s nice to see how many people are highly pleased getting a little bit for free for their initial investment

[noiseboyuk]

I went through the D50 Roland Cloud plugin last night, and I already hear a lot of similar style patches in Omnisphere. So I'm speculating that Eric sampled some of the original waveforms from the PCM section of the synth and that's what's being included in Omnisphere. So maybe not 1:1 absolute/patch recreations (we already have the Cloud version for that), but perhaps remastered versions of those waves that allow for some very good, and authentic D50 sounds within Omnisphere, combined with Eric's patch programing abilities.

My understanding is that the samples are Roland copyright, so nobody can legally use them without an agreement. This is unlike a synth with no samples, modelling those seems to be legally ok.

We already know that Spectrasonics have licensed some D-50 sounds because they've been in there for years. But it's not exactly comprehensive - just 4 sound sources in fact, two based around D-50 bells (a sampled part of the famous Fantasia sound) and two variants of Dream Frontiers. These seem to be regular samples too, rather than the tiny transient 8 bit PCM source samples used in the D-50. It'll be very interesting to see what they licensed this time in terms of raw materials, and then what Eric & Co have done with the patches.

The 4 layer architecture of Omni's 2.5 release I guess has made D-50-style programming possible, since that was also based on 4 constituent parts. Eric's breakdown of the Fantasia patch that's in the video in the OP is a brilliant look at how it worked, and pretty much all that and of course way more than be done in Omni now pretty easily. Let's face it, with the D-50 it's the Persing Secret Sauce that we're all hoping for some more of.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

noiseboyuk, I wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility that Roland might've licensed out some of the sample data to Spectrasonics considering their history with Eric, or that it's even possible that Eric could've originally licensed those samples to Roland in the first place and that agreement is finally up 30 years later. The latter seems unlikely considering how big companies are with intellectual property, but I'm not sure if Eric was an employee or contractor...so what I'm saying is, unlikely, but I don't know the details of their relationship or any agreements that may have been in place. Didn't Yamaha just "give" Dave Smith back the Sequential Circuits name even though they now owned it? Not the same thing, but sometimes having a relationship and stellar reputation helps open doors that might otherwise be closed to others.

All that said, you're probably right. And that's cool too. But the reason I think it's more than Eric's secret sauce is because there's already a ton of patches in Omnisphere that harken back to the D-50 without using any of the waveforms. I mean, Eric's got a style and things he likes, and you hear similar sounds all over the Omni library. So why make a point of bringing it up unless it's more than that?

[noiseboyuk]

Well I reckon the main difference really is the architecture, and programming Omni in the manner of a D-50. Probably with some new soundsources. I think with the (excellent) Roland Cloud version of the D-50 still warm from the oven, I doubt we’ll suddenly see the rights handed over.

Anyway, someone who lives near Anaheim can settle this right now. Pop down to NAMM and get to the Soectrasonics booth will ya?

[Cinebient]

Uups...double...

[noiseboyuk]

Some answers in this Eric Persing / Sound On Sound video, which focuses mostly at the Juno 106, D-50 and the new Arpeggiator:



The D-50 section starts at about 4'08. They've added to Omni an equivalent of the TVA bias functions which weight keyboard response (that seems very important in some of Eric's D-50 presets), captured the analogue waveforms as wavetables, and then the big one - does seem to indicate they've translated the D-50 PCM samples into soundsources. I'm not 100% clear if these are all or some of the factory transient samples or are slightly bigger chunks, but it sure looks like an awful lot of the D-50 guts is now going to be in Omnisphere. Clearly a deal has been done!

[sacer]

NKS support would be nice, would be realy comfortable to browse this huge library

https://freelancesoundlabs.com/index.ph ... te-kontrol

I already have this, also for uvi falcon + vintage vault and nexus. But it would be nice if it would be supported from spectrasonics, because they would do a bether mapping and all new updated new sounds would be included. Also if you preview the sound, some prelistenings are to loud, i think if the manufacturer supports NKS and NI has to confirm these patches, they offer a much bether quality.
But yes it's a good solution as long as they don'thave it.

[Cinebient]

The arp update looks really nice. I like arps.

[samsam]

I'd stopped buying SW for a while now but with the new HW integration thing and finally a template for my main synth - Nord Wave - totally tempted to buy an extremely expensive bit of SW. Yikes.

[beely]

Watched the SOS vid. My feeling is that Eric said his original sounds are soundsources at the low end of the PCM list, and then the Omni soundsources come after that. So I dont think the D50 raw samples are there, he’s just sampled his D50 presets as soundsources. This would also avoid problems for Roland with people wanting a D50 plugin without getting the Roland one.

Still, pretty cool, and they've modelled the VA waves as wave tables so you should be able to recreate Soundtrack in OS at least...

[noiseboyuk]

It's a real shame the cameraman had the focus on the programmer and never once went into Omni, which was blurry throughout. Grrr. (kinda weird to see a NAMM video where the camera's on a tripod, ain't it?) One soundsource looked like it might say Fantasia, but was too blurry to be sure. If so then it's sampled patches which would be a real shame. But Eric having made a point that the PCM samples are called Soundsources in Omni suggests its something less blunt.

I wonder if its a halfway house. Being as they've gone to the bother of creating the bias etc, that does make it look like you'll be able to properly program using the raw elements. Once again referencing Eric's D-50 video in the OP, that first atonal tinkly element seems pretty crucial to getting an authentic Fantasia, for example, if you were building it in layers. They maybe sampled that complete layer with fx and other programming, so not the raw sample but not the full patch either.

[beely]

My guess would be - various D50 sound sources sampled from D50 patches, but *not* the RAW PCM's straight from the D50. I'm sure this will become clearer as we know more.

However, if the bulk of the D50 is kinda "modelled" using the hardware profiles, it's probably easy enough to rip/sample out the PCM samples from the D50 for personal use, and import them as user samples in Omnisphere, if you really wanted to do that. With the D50 wavetables, you should be able to get very close to the original patches should you want that (I'm not sure how much of a draw that is, honestly) but certainly you'd be able to get the closest to "a modern D50" with the character, but the better engine of OS. Certainly a nice cool little extra, in any case.

In fact, with a little work, you could have the D50, M1, WS, SY and other PCM-front end synths right there in OS too...

[beely]

Just watched the Synthtopia video (different from the one above), and again Eric says at the bottom of the PCM waveforms is "all the classic D50 patches I made as sound sources", so again, this says to me that the PCM slider doesn't contain the raw PCMs (otherwise, the slider at the bottom would choose PCM number 1, etc).

He's very specific and consistent with his wording...

He does also take the "Steel Pick" sound, which *sounds* like an attack transient, and layer it with something else. Steel Pick however is a D50 preset, using the PCM waves "Bells" and "Sect2", so again, this suggests that the sound sources are complete presets, not the raw waves.

And yes, "Soundtrack" is in there...

Synthtopia


Sonic State


You can see on the Sonic State video the sound sources scroll, and they are indeed only the D50 *presets*, not the raw D50 PCM samples, which are never shown when the sound sources are scrolled with the PCM button - the list is D50 sampled presets, then Omnisphere sound sources.