Korg Wavestate and Opsix for Win/Mac

[tripleflows]

Yes, the Opsix hardware is unfortunately really limited with its mono-timbrality, making it useful for live / stage performance only.

Anyway, Korg Opsix is much more than a conventional FM synth: the additional semi-modular 6-osc virtual analogue, waveshaper and additive synthesis significantly extends the instrument's capabilities.

Fortunately all hardware Opsix owners can get the Opsix Native software version for cheap, so multitimbral DAW-based music composition with the Native version easily wins with multiple virtual instances.

[kritikon]

I never found monotimbrality an issue for any synth. And that never stopped me multitracking in DAWs - isn't that the point of DAW recording? You don't have to have a multitimbral synth for anything because you've got thousands of recordable channels? I actually thought multitimbral synths were a dying thing. I used them in the 90s but just don't need them nowadays.

As for Native enabling multiple versions - depends on your setup. I have a pretty common 3 yr old HP i7 laptop on Win11 with no fancy tweaking or changes and Native Opsix is completely f**ked if I load up more than 1 instance, always was. Just the 1 instance hogs about half of my CPU, any more and it crashes. It behaves the same if I load up a Wavestate too. It's quite broken and never been fixed by Korg Japan - unlike the US Wavestate team who fixed the same issue on their plugin. So actually my hw Opsix wins hands down over the buggy-as-hell sw version and is rock solid. I'm pleased I got Native so cheap, because it's almost worthless.

[kritikon]

Do you have the first or second gen? I am looking in to it a bit more (didn't want to just drop that there without digging in a bit) and what it sounds like to me is the initial rev had many issues around QC - if you got a good one you were fine, but a lot of people didn't - and the second gen ones were much better.

I have nothing against light synths, I would just want one where all the knobs and joystick work

I was pretty tempted last year because I think the Modwave and Wavestate are two of the most innovative new synths in a long time. As it is, I am happy with Native though, it's excellent.

1st gen, both Wavestate and Opsix. I haven't had any problems at all. Maybe I'm just lucky, I dunno. All I know is that all the keys, knobs, switches and sliders all work, always did straight out of the box.

So far it's:
Wavestate HW win-win
Opsix HW win-win
Wavestate Native lose-win (bad CPU issues initially but now fixed)
Opsix Native lose-lose (CPU issues almost unusable never fixed & looks like it won't ever be)

[Examigan]

Do you have the first or second gen? I am looking in to it a bit more (didn't want to just drop that there without digging in a bit) and what it sounds like to me is the initial rev had many issues around QC - if you got a good one you were fine, but a lot of people didn't - and the second gen ones were much better.

I have nothing against light synths, I would just want one where all the knobs and joystick work

I was pretty tempted last year because I think the Modwave and Wavestate are two of the most innovative new synths in a long time. As it is, I am happy with Native though, it's excellent.

Opsix Native lose-lose (CPU issues almost unusable never fixed & looks like it won't ever be)

I don't think the presets gave me too much trouble with the CPU in the recent past. Are there certain presets I should check to see if I have the same issue?

I have v1.2.1 on my PC.

[kritikon]

It behaves that way on any and all presets for me. The whole plug-in is screwed. It's a weird thing because it doesn't sound like all users had the issue, but it was common - my laptop is pretty bog standard, nothing unique or special, standard Win11, standard Cubase, standard cpu & board etc. Certainly if you've got a beefed up spec computer, then it's at least usable, but still an utter cpu hog apparently. Sounds almost like it's an old denormal kinda thing as it especially does that massive spike in cpu when it goes idle. Open up a second instance and the whole laptop goes crazy. Wavestate was the same but Korg US eventually fixed it. That's what's so annoying - Korg Japan oversee Opsix Native apparently, so all they have to do is talk to Korg US to see how they fixed it, but they just won't. I'm a Korg fan boy- love their hw and always have, but sw is not one of their strengths, sadly.

[D-Fusion]

It behaves that way on any and all presets for me. The whole plug-in is screwed. It's a weird thing because it doesn't sound like all users had the issue, but it was common - my laptop is pretty bog standard, nothing unique or special, standard Win11, standard Cubase, standard cpu & board etc. Certainly if you've got a beefed up spec computer, then it's at least usable, but still an utter cpu hog apparently. Sounds almost like it's an old denormal kinda thing as it especially does that massive spike in cpu when it goes idle. Open up a second instance and the whole laptop goes crazy. Wavestate was the same but Korg US eventually fixed it. That's what's so annoying - Korg Japan oversee Opsix Native apparently, so all they have to do is talk to Korg US to see how they fixed it, but they just won't. I'm a Korg fan boy- love their hw and always have, but sw is not one of their strengths, sadly.

It is a Cubase problem and I saw the same thing on my High end Desktop PC.
Play a few notes and wait a second or two and watch the Cpu mayhem unfold in the Cubase cpu meter.
Cubase, Steinberg the creators of vst have lost their way in how their own format works lately when it comes to 3rd party vst's and there is always something that pops up every now and then with it.

The newer Korg Vst's works fine in Studio one and Bitwig and probably in the other Daws that i don't own too so i guess that is why they don't have any fix for it since they see it as a Cubase problem.

The weird thing is that my AMD Ryzen 5700X is more stable in Cubase with those plugins than my main rig which is a Intel Core I7 12700KF so maybe there is a Denormal bug in Cubase's Vst Handling Code that is getting triggered with certain vst's or a bug in their multi threading scheduler?

What version of Cubase do you use?
I tested this in Cubase 12 and haven't bothered to Install V13 because of the nasty gui bugs it had in the first 6 Months that is fixed now so not sure if it runs better in V13.

[kritikon]

Good to know it's Cubase and not Korg then. I'm on Cubase 13. TBH I don't think I've even tried Opsix in the latest 13, as I pretty well gave up on it in 12 and initial release 13. It was berzerker on 10.5 also. Maybe I should give it a go to double check, I suppose they might have fixed it. By the way, the 13 GUI bugs seem to be fixed (for me anyway). Steinberg informed about settings changes for the graphics card, definitely works for NVidia graphics. I think I remember it is still broken for some specific boards. It was literally a couple of graphics card settings changes so simple that even a complete Luddite like me could do it. Wasn't expecting it to work but it's now solid as a rock...which is definitely a step up from unusable .

[tripleflows]

There are strange crashes with latest Opsix Native and Cubase Pro 13 indeed, sometimes even the project does not reload due to the Opsix vst3 plugin. On the other hand I manage to run 50-60 Opsix Native instances real-time for the demo song.

[indigo76]

Quick heads-up: Opsix Update 1.3.0 dropped. This one's a pretty substantial one:

- Visualization of parameter modulation (nice!)
- Right-clicking a parameter allows setting up a virtual patch (i.e. modulation matrix entry) for that parameter (mod matrix editing is so much easier now)

Release notes here:
https://support.korguser.net/hc/en-us/a ... ease-notes

[tripleflows]

Finally, it looks many things have improved this time.
Even the Motion sequencer recording works now.