Omnisphere 3

[Choikdoi]

Eric Persing is a god, everyone knows that.

He looks like he is about to explode

burning through the sky, 200 degrees, thats why they call him mr farenheit

He wants to make a Spectrasonics man out of you.

[machinesworking]

My biggest question about Omnisphere is how is the browser? 10k+ patches are bloat if you don't have a comprehensive and detailed tagging system that narrows a search down to a few dozen patches. NI got better about this with Komplete Kontrol but IMO it's still too little categories. If that is the case with Omnisphere that you can really effectively narrow down a search then 10k+ patches are fine. Also is it NKS compatible?

[cryophonik]

My biggest question about Omnisphere is how is the browser?

[IvyBirds]

My biggest question about Omnisphere is how is the browser? 10k+ patches are bloat if you don't have a comprehensive and detailed tagging system that narrows a search down to a few dozen patches. NI got better about this with Komplete Kontrol but IMO it's still too little categories. If that is the case with Omnisphere that you can really effectively narrow down a search then 10k+ patches are fine. Also is it NKS compatible?

Absolutely you can use Omnisphere with your NKS compatible controller. You can program that to do anything you want with Omnisphere

If you can't be bothered to do that you can buy a template to do so

https://freelancesoundlabs.com/spectras ... announced/

And the sounds, samples, are tagged and arranged in categories. The new version has an improved browser interface with all kinds of tags, keywords, etc all arranged into categories

It's far from being bloat. Eric Persing talks about the new system here starting at the 9:00 mark

[zerocrossing]

I do a sort of Radioheadish hybrid music.

Link?

[Alexander_D]

Tomorrow we will see more reviews on YouTube! I think it's a really nice updated. Maybe to late...but still nice

[_leras]

My biggest question about Omnisphere is how is the browser? 10k+ patches are bloat if you don't have a comprehensive and detailed tagging system that narrows a search down to a few dozen patches.

Or how quickly they can be stepped through. You should see my drum sample collection.

After a certain point though, more sounds don't help so much as having the ability to tweak them.

I

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

I don't do EDM either, but the Radiotone Melodies patch is so beautiful.

The problem wasn’t that I don’t do EDM (After all, many sounds are not restricted to one genre). And while I know taste is subjective, I really thought so many of the sounds from that ‘pack’ were objectively, and obnoxiously bad.

But one of the worst things, imo, was how much louder these sounds were than all the others. When I went patch scavenging I’d pretty much always shuffle the deck. So I never knew when I'd get blasted

The solution I arrived at was to leave all sounds I knew I'd never use completely un-starred, so that sorting by ratings would leave them all at the bottom. But to accomplish this meant having to rate every single patch. I'm not sure how many I got done before I eventually sold the software (Not for that reason).

[noiseboyuk]

My biggest question about Omnisphere is how is the browser? 10k+ patches are bloat if you don't have a comprehensive and detailed tagging system that narrows a search down to a few dozen patches.

Or how quickly they can be stepped through. You should see my drum sample collection.

After a certain point though, more sounds don't help so much as having the ability to tweak them.

This is one of the biggest reasons to use Omni imo.

The fact that the scope of the synth is so vast means that it's like having many synths in one. But better, because once you've learned how Omni works, it applies to everything. The learning curve is actually pretty shallow, and with pretty simple tricks you can make patches your own very quickly. This is one of the big reasons it is so beloved imo - I find it very quick to find and modify pretty much anything at all, so it's a huge time-saver and keeps the creative juices flowing.

[pinki]

To be fair Eric talks about an 'existential crisis' he had with Omnisphere, that adding more sounds was going to make Omnisphere worse. So the 'more is more' brigade are ignoring the creator of the instrument when they dismiss people who feel Omnisphere is 'bloated' ...Eric himself even says so in the video, or at least he was worried about that!

And it's always been the reason I've not bought it after initially buying Atmosphere. The idea of limitations in composing music is a well known thing and having too much choice (45000 sounds or whatever) is a creativity killer for some, myself included.

However it's a problem Spectrasonics have now recognised and the new way of curated 'packs' seems like a good way forward. I might give it another try with this update though I am such a UVI/Falcon fan, I don't feel a burning need. UVI just keep coming up with these small beautiful instruments- that run 'inside' Falcon and I love that way of working. Is this what Eric was taking inspiration from with the new 'pack' curation? That's cool if he is.

[noiseboyuk]

To be fair Eric talks about an 'existential crisis' he had with Omnisphere, that adding more sounds was going to make Omnisphere worse. So the 'more is more' brigade are ignoring the creator of the instrument when they dismiss people who feel Omnisphere is 'bloated' ...Eric himself even says so in the video, or at least he was worried about that!

And it's always been the reason I've not bought it after initially buying Atmosphere. The idea of limitations in composing music is a well known thing and having too much choice (45000 sounds or whatever) is a creativity killer for some, myself included.

However it's a problem Spectrasonics have now recognised and the new way of curated 'packs' seems like a good way forward. I might give it another try with this update though I am such a UVI/Falcon fan, I don't feel a burning need. UVI just keep coming up with these small beautiful instruments- that run 'inside' Falcon and I love that way of working. Is this what Eric was taking inspiration from with the new 'pack' curation? That's cool if he is.

...an existential crisis that resulted in him adding a ton more stuff!

The major mistake Spectrasonics made at its inception was to have fixed directories. IMO that is the single big thing they wanted to solve with O3 - break the requirement for a patch to only exist in one place. A Synth Mono might also need to be in Retro Land - well tough, pick one.

They've fixed that. Great, but the solution they came up with has problems of its own. Now when browsing ALL, you have the same patch counted multiple times. The new structure is incompatible with all their other libraries (Moog, Trilain etc). It's a mess. Their solution to all that is to more or less force users into only using a smaller subset of libraries to search, and set those every single time.

I can see it being a little frustrating in use. Honestly I think a far better solution would have been to keep all their old standards but just change the directories so a patch can exist in more than one, and only appears once in a search. Then you can have curated directories - the same 18 they've introduced now if they like - OR you can still drill down starting from everything (including all their other products and third party). That's how I've used it for years, and it works just great with OmniTag conforming all my third party presets to the same standard. It takes me no time at all to drill down to meaningful results using this method.

They broke a really common way people use their product to solve a problem - imo that wasn't necessary to solve that problem.

[pinki]

Hmm, it all sounds very complicated.
In Falcon there is no meta-search, so you are forced to get to know the different instruments they make. This way seems to work for my simple brain. No overload...I am able to not download the instruments I have no interest in. Thereby Falcon stays lean and I know in my inner ear what each instrument sounds like. (I have Sonic Pass subscription of course to make this way of working happen).

Horses for courses I guess. I know Omnisphere has bucket loads of wonderful sounds I can hear I would use, it's just the fear of overload that keeps me away.

The Omni 3 solution to this seemed like a good one but now I read what you say on this I am not so sure.

[LoveEnigma18]

The new Browser is what I am looking forward to trying out too.

I wonder if Spectrasonics will do more Sonic Extensions or the future will be genre-focused preset expansions like everyone else does these days and similar to what they did with Omnisphere 3. I must say that the new library they added in Omnisphere 3 is incredible (at least for the sheer number of presets) and it itself might be worth an upgrade for many, including myself.

[noiseboyuk]

The new Browser is what I am looking forward to trying out too.

I wonder if Spectrasonics will do more Sonic Extensions or the future will be genre-focused preset expansions like everyone else does these days and similar to what they did with Omnisphere 3. I must say that the new library they added in Omnisphere 3 is incredible (at least for the sheer number of presets) and it itself might be worth an upgrade for many, including myself.

One thing on the number of presets - it IS incredible, but don't be fooled by those headline numbers.

It claims that the new patch libraries contain 26,421 patches. Well kinda - technically yes, but these are not all unique patches.

I picked one patch at random - Dolby's Guitaret. It is s counted no less than 7 times, appearing in:

Ambient Dreams - Synths
Electronic Underground - Synths
Experimental Organic - Textures
Retro Vibes - Synths
Scoring Electronic - Synths
Warm Tones - Synths
Omnisphere Library - Retroland (legacy version)

So how many patches are unique? I set my coding-genius son to it, and based on the information on the Spectrasonics website, there are 13,915 unique patch names. Still a ton of new patches though, right? Well... not exactly. 9,242 of those patches are remastered legacy ones. So for unique totally new patches, the final number is 4,673.

Now that IS still a lot of patches. If you just want new quality patches, the cost of the upgrade easily worth it - when I compared with The Unfinished's bundle of all Omni libraries (he's excellent), it's about 1/4 of the cost (never mind the rest of the synth's improvements). But in truth it is only 18% of the claimed 26,421.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

It seems pretty crazy that they'd count every appearance of the same preset when talking about the final amount.
And yes, that would really hamper the fun of the ‘ALL’ crawl