Omnisphere 2 slow interface

[MegaPixel]

Let the testing begin.

So.. what the hell?

Perhaps this shouldn't be a surprise. Were it something this simple, the issue would have been identified by now. Reports have come in from multiple DAWs so it is not specific to Cubase, and I'm now thinking it is highly unlikely to be to do with the VST versions.

Here's what we can say with confidence - clicking the Spectrasonics browsers draws heavily on the CPU. However, this may or may not correlate with poor browser performance, and no-one has yet found a reliable way to replicate the fault.

(side note - jeepers, XO. It remains at 100% CPU all the the time the GUI is open. It drops to 30% when it is closed).

You have exactly the same issue as me, just I have a i9900k overclocked a little on all cores to 4.68 to 4.8ghz (depending on load), but I have 1/2 your ram with 32GB of DDR4 running at 3600 using XMP profile in bios.

You will notice when you have omnisphere open that just moving the preset browsers slider up and down fast you will max out core 3 (id 2), just like me and for us it seems omni lives on mostly just that 1 core and 1 other.

This is the result of me just scrolling the preset browser up and down with omni open in standalone mode... And yes it's a big WTF...

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I've been on support for over 2 hours with them remoted in on my computer they will just take you through make sure AV is off, make sure omni is using your GPU (it will by default), run it in standalone, run in daw. I showed him when omni lags out while in the daw, it passes the lag on to the daw also and nothing is clickable while omni is sometimes just working out where the preset browser scroll window should be. He witnessed for himself it jumping around without me doing anything... There was mention of switching omni to debug mode, but he never did that... But I doubt it would help, it needs one of their devs to remote in on our machine with visual studio (I assume) installed and run a build version of omni to see what it is doing wrong exactly on our systems...

[noiseboyuk]

Does Omni ALWAYS misbehave on your system? If so it's more useful to them than mine. All the while it's working perfectly happily with the CPU maxed at 100%, it's no use to them. But I'll use it later and it will be terrible, most likely. (This is like taking your car to the garage).

What I don't know is if EVERYONE has this to some extent, or if there is some combination of components. I have an MBP, I think it's much better behaved on that - anyone here have these issues on a Mac?

[MegaPixel]

Does Omni ALWAYS misbehave on your system? If so it's more useful to them than mine. All the while it's working perfectly happily with the CPU maxed at 100%, it's no use to them. But I'll use it later and it will be terrible, most likely. (This is like taking your car to the garage).

What I don't know is if EVERYONE has this to some extent, or if there is some combination of components. I have an MBP, I think it's much better behaved on that - anyone here have these issues on a Mac?

It's always bad on mine, but was far worse before I got vistual studio to freez it for doing something bad in some memory address, then after that it was a lot more responsive but it still bad, standalone and in all my DAWs.

But as far as I know its fine for many, but there are many with our problems on both pc and mac.

Pluginhugger (unify) if you watch his videos on youtube you can see omni working quite well on his system but in newer videos you can see/hear when he switches a preset with omni in it as the video and/or audio will sometimes glitch.

[zvenx]

It has never ever happened to me on either mac or pc, on either my current systems or omnisphere 1 on my previous systems.
rsp

[DizzlerMusic]

Slow GUI is one problem. I emailed them like 4-5 years ago (then again every 6 month) about some other issues, one with their reverb (pro R) that creates audio glitches if you feed it audio thats too loud (they confirmed it and it wasnt there in previous versions) + a bunch of other bugs and problems.
They even asked me to send presets that have that issue and then they confirmed all and said i should work with an older version till it gets fixed. They told me that like 1-2 years ago.
I checked every update till then, but they just bothered to fix it, or emailed me about the status.

At this point i think they just dont care anymore, they are close to Omnisphere 3.0 so they probably dont want to waste too much time for Omnisphere 2.0 anymore, which obv sucks for existing customers like me, who paid 500 euros or so(closer to 1000euros with Keyscape and Trillian) and cant use the software anymore (or at least its not fun anymore because its lagging like crazy for example or audio glitching with every 2nd of my old presets).

Thats why I moved on to other great synths like Phaseplant by Kilohearts, who actually CARE about their customers and you can just write to them on their discord and they will fix every bug you submit to them (sooner or later).

[MegaPixel]

Slow GUI is one problem. I emailed them like 4-5 years ago (then again every 6 month) about some other issues, one with their reverb (pro R) that creates audio glitches if you feed it audio thats too loud (they confirmed it and it wasnt there in previous versions) + a bunch of other bugs and problems.
They even asked me to send presets that have that issue and then they confirmed all and said i should work with an older version till it gets fixed. They told me that like 1-2 years ago.
I checked every update till then, but they just bothered to fix it, or emailed me about the status.

At this point i think they just dont care anymore, they are close to Omnisphere 3.0 so they probably dont want to waste too much time for Omnisphere 2.0 anymore, which obv sucks for existing customers like me, who paid 500 euros or so(closer to 1000euros with Keyscape and Trillian) and cant use the software anymore (or at least its not fun anymore because its lagging like crazy for example or audio glitching with every 2nd of my old presets).

Thats why I moved on to other great synths like Phaseplant by Kilohearts, who actually CARE about their customers and you can just write to them on their discord and they will fix every bug you submit to them (sooner or later).

I don't think we will see Omni 3.0 any time soon, they were hiring a c++ dev about 2 weeks or so ago. Big learning curve to bring a new dev in mid way or nearing the end of a 3.0 build and expect them to contribute a lot without screwing things up and learning from those mistakes in alpha 3.0 build tests and taking the time of any in house devs who know it inside out...

Hopefully when they do release 3.0, they will make a converter for 2.x presets to import into 3.0, I doubt I will be upgrading though, like you have found out, we know what to expect from them now. I hope they don't store presets like they do in 2.x, stoooooopid design/method of doing things.

[zvenx]

Why do you not assume that omnisphere 3 will read omnisphere 2 patches without need of conversion etc?
Omnisphere 2 read omnipshere 1 patches without issue.
rsp

[MegaPixel]

Why do you not assume that omnisphere 3 will read omnisphere 2 patches without need of conversion etc?
Omnisphere 2 read omnipshere 1 patches without issue.
rsp

I assume this because from a programmer's perspective the method they use to store and load presets and wav data is terrible and only contributes to slow parsing, adding, updating, streaming and loading times. I take pride in my work and how I program things, I wouldn't have considered loading and storing things like that (not for this use case), not even back in 2000 when I was a junior.

A converter would not be hard to create, in the end your just storing audio files/data and software preset configuration data, which can be extremely easily and simply done via text/json/xml and storing a path to the wav file.

Want to protect a preset from human readability then use fxp, or just make some encoder of your own kind, again very easy. The FXP format can be decoded and re-encoded quite easily as you can find the code and tools for this online and in many github repositories.

u-he presets are /r/n (newline) formatted text based files (human readable)

Spire & - SPF2 are JSON based files (human readable)

Vital - Also use JSON formatted preset files.

Phaseplant - encode their presets in their own custom encoder but also store wav data in the preset file also, clearly marked and easily extracted in a hex editor or use notepad++

Serum - FXP encoded with text based storage for a path to the wav files it uses for noises and wavetables (same as vital does it, just in readable JSON format)

There's no need to do what spectrasonics have done with omni and have massive amounts of data bundled into multiple files which makes parsing them slow and clumsy. Simply attach the free database technology sqlite (which can easily store 100,000 presets in it, with other data, there are other options also) and run a scan on the preset folder, then let the software use the database file (sqlite database) to give you your preset browser and job done, just load the preset file and parse it. Massive does it this way, but NI somehow managed to screwed up the programming for that and the information that is stored in it

I can go on...

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

They did successfully a fix a slow GUI issue in the recent past. Previously, whenever I'd open the GUI for any Spectrasonics instrument, the instrument would be fine, but the framerate in Reaper or Studio One would slow to a crawl as long as the Spectrasonics instrument window was open. Closing the GUI would restore a proper framerate in my hosts.

This issue was fixed a year or two ago.

I haven't had anything I'd consider abnormal with GUI response time since. But that's just my system. Can't speak to the issues being discussed recently other than to say they did resolve something related to slow GUI's being reported by some users and I no longer have issues as a result.

[noiseboyuk]

FWIW I have no sene we’re close to Omni 3, or even if there ever will be one. Maybe there will, maybe it’ll be out tomorrow, but it doesn’t seem all that likely to me.

Thanks for comments from folks who don’t have this issue. What’s your graphics card, MegaPixel? Mine is a 1050ti. Spidey sense says that the card may be a factor - did Spectrasonics go through that with you?

[zvenx]

Indeed the graphic card would be the obvious first candidate.
But I have heard about it before the 1050 even came into being.

And this PC has an AMD and the previous one had a Nvidia and neither had it. My Macbook Pro has a Nvidia and that too is fine..

It's been trick for them to replicate is the issue alas, afaik.
rsp

[MegaPixel]

FWIW I have no sene we’re close to Omni 3, or even if there ever will be one. Maybe there will, maybe it’ll be out tomorrow, but it doesn’t seem all that likely to me.

Thanks for comments from folks who don’t have this issue. What’s your graphics card, MegaPixel? Mine is a 1050ti. Spidey sense says that the card may be a factor - did Spectrasonics go through that with you?

Full system spec:
- i9 9900k OCd on all cores to 4.68 to 4.8 (depending on load)
- 32 GB Ram DDR4 3600 running xmp profile
- RTX 3080ti
- Scarlet 6i6
- NVME 2TB EVO boot
- 3 x SATA SSDs (1TB, 2TB, 4TB)
- 2 x WD Black 8TB (backups: 1 internal, 1 external (mirror) - plugged in when needed, dont like nas raid or drive swapping every 5 years on them)
- Dual monitor (4K main @ 1440p, 1440p secondary)

OS: Win 10 Pro (latest patches etc).

- I've tried normal NVIDIA game ready drivers,
- NVIDIA drivers installed via NVSLIM to cut out all the garbage and tracking and lower the latency from them.
- Now using NVIDIA creative drivers with NVSLIM to cut out all the bloat and tracking etc


Had same issues when waiting for my RTX3080 using built in intel graphics.


RE: Did Spectrasonics go through that with me.
Yep. All the usual stuff. AV, Device software selection for the RTX3080, etc. Its the play book of every software support service in existence, the mandatory test set, none of it helped.

[noiseboyuk]

Thanks to you both.

I'm going through the process with Spectrasonics now. Just tried switching Omni and Stylus to Power Saving in Graphics Settings which apparently sometimes helps, but not here. So by the sounds of things graphics card is a bum steer.

[sindecay]

I had no issues with it, not the fastest vst but pretty quick still

[Zoopy]

I've always had lag with any envelope that used curve1 or 2? I think it was called. Any envelope with an adjustable curve causes huge frame drops, on both my PCs which have powerful gaming graphics cards.

Spectrasonics actually spent a long time working with me trying to fix it and the support was really good. Still broken tho ☺