Omnisphere 2 is here! (yes, it's really here!)

[declan32001]

Nothing new here really, but Eric does go out of his way to say that that the loading times "are so quick now" - he doesn't elaborate and I didn't see anything about that in the specs.

But for anyone (like me) who was curious where Trilian's Main Page in 2 is, well you just load a patch from Trilian and it just appears in all its crimson glory 8:40 mark). Cool beans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNiM3iXky38&app=desktop

[noiseboyuk]

Nothing new here really, but Eric does go out of his way to say that that the loading times "are so quick now" - he doesn't elaborate and I didn't see anything about that in the specs.

It does look very fast. I wonder if they're now using something like Kontakt's background loading.

[Phorous]

Nothing new here really, but Eric does go out of his way to say that that the loading times "are so quick now" - he doesn't elaborate and I didn't see anything about that in the specs.

It does look very fast. I wonder if they're now using something like Kontakt's background loading.

Omnisphere already has a disk streaming mode as the default which lets you change patches nearly instantly. The one caveat about it is I find it causes issues during realtime playback because it can't load the beginning of a patch fast enough when its triggered over MIDI.

Maybe they made it the best of both worlds now where it streams initially and then keeps it in memory after that?

[declan32001]

Nothing new here really, but Eric does go out of his way to say that that the loading times "are so quick now" - he doesn't elaborate and I didn't see anything about that in the specs.

It does look very fast. I wonder if they're now using something like Kontakt's background loading.

Yeah. I know we've got 2 & a half months to wait, but I am waiting for the inevitable promo vids Spectrasonics will no doubt be coming out with.

In this vid you can clearly tell Eric's zonked at the last day of NAMM, but I'm ready to see Diego, Ignacio et al show how they roll with 2.

Honestly I'm more excited about "the little things" here because improving my enjoyment of Omnisphere is an incredibly valuable thing to me.

[declan32001]

Nothing new here really, but Eric does go out of his way to say that that the loading times "are so quick now" - he doesn't elaborate and I didn't see anything about that in the specs.

It does look very fast. I wonder if they're now using something like Kontakt's background loading.

Omnisphere already has a disk streaming mode as the default which lets you change patches nearly instantly. The one caveat about it is I find it causes issues during realtime playback because it can't load the beginning of a patch fast enough when its triggered over MIDI.

Maybe they made it the best of both worlds now where it streams initially and then keeps it in memory after that?

That would be great because I run into that a lot because I arp gigantic samples in Trilian as sort of "sketching a song".

But that doesn't explain what I think I saw in that video, and why Eric remarked about it. I could be wrong, but I'm hoping noiseboyuk is right.

[noiseboyuk]

Declan - they do list "Fast Progressive Loading allows rapid auditioning" on their feature set, so there's definitely something new here going on, it's just a case of what its doing exactly and how it works. It's only the big patches that ever hold me up as it is, the vast majority are a second or less on SSD, but clearly its faster again in that video - it looks practically instantaneous.

Honestly I'm more excited about "the little things" here because improving my enjoyment of Omnisphere is an incredibly valuable thing to me.

I know what you mean. The two big talking points here are price and the importing samples, but there are so many other apparently smaller things that I know will be a really big deal in use. A couple of times now Eric has referred to soundmatch as something new to synths, by using the example of Amazon, Netflix et al to suggest alternatives to what you're currently looking at. I do like that kind of thinking, taking ideas from elsewhere that we take for granted and applying them to something new. It might not be as sexy a sell as sample import, but day to day it'll be incredibly useful.

Speaking of which, I'm guessing that soundmatch will work on all patches, not just Spectrasonics own. How I presume it works is largely based on tagging, but perhaps with some other specifics like an arp pattern, say. So if the rest of your stuff is appropriately tagged, it'll come up in soundmatch.

[noiseboyuk]

Spectrasonics tweeted:

@Spectrasonics: @ChaninOfficial Over 2,000 new SS and 2,000 new patches so far...but likely ever bigger!

(ss=soundsources)

And in reply to "I'll take 2,500":

@Spectrasonics: @ChaninOfficial Actually….it will likely be higher than what you are hoping for and continuing to grow too.

[Echoes in the Attic]

Spectrasonics tweeted:

@Spectrasonics: @ChaninOfficial Over 2,000 new SS and 2,000 new patches so far...but likely ever bigger!

(ss=soundsources)

Oh wow. I thought when they said over 3000 new sounds that most of those would be presets, maybe a few hundred new sound sources. But 2,000 sound sources? That's great. The original had 2740 I think so it will close to double the sound source list then?

See this is why they shouldn't use the term "sounds". It doesn't mean anything. If they group patches and sound sources together you have no idea what is really new. Out of 3000 new sounds I guessed maybe 500 would be new sound sources but the update is clearly bigger than that.

[noiseboyuk]

Oh wow. I thought when they said over 3000 new sounds that most of those would be presets, maybe a few hundred new sound sources. But 2,000 sound sources? That's great. The original had 2740 I think so it will close to double the sound source list then?

See this is why they shouldn't use the term "sounds". It doesn't mean anything. If they group patches and sound sources together you have no idea what is really new. Out of 3000 new sounds I guessed maybe 500 would be new sound sources but the update is clearly bigger than that.

Yeah, I agree re the vague term "sounds", not a helpful word in this context. I'd guessed a thousand soundsources, but yes this is big stuff - as you say close to doubling the original number. Eric said they'd had to prune from 128gb! So I do wonder how set-in-stone the 13gb file size is if they've still been choosing and tweaking.

I suspect patches are about the last things on the list to be done, once everything else is in place (including soundsources of course). I'd say it's pretty likely that whatever patches get released, they'll be added to over subsequent updates. It's perhaps too optimistic to imagine the same kind of numbers of patches released after 1.0 (I think an additional 3,000-4,000 in the end) - that would just be greedy really...

[Echoes in the Attic]

The update will only be an extra 13gb? Not that I'm complaining it's just that the original was almost 50 gb for 2700 sound sources, so 13gb is surprising for another 2000 sound sources. Maybe not as much multi-samples and perhaps instead there are a lot of single audio file sources, like the phrases to be used with granular.

[noiseboyuk]

The update will only be an extra 13gb? Not that I'm complaining it's just that the original was almost 50 gb for 2700 sound sources, so 13gb is surprising for another 2000 sound sources. Maybe not as much multi-samples and perhaps instead there are a lot of single audio file sources, like the phrases to be used with granular.

Yes, size will depend on lots of things. There's a ton of sampled waveforms in Trilian which would be tiny, and the Moog expansion has a few hundred soundsources and is a small size (I seem to remember that Zimmer's modular drums takes up a quarter of the size with just one soundsource!)

But what seems strange is to have announced the total size and then afterwards talk about how they are only just pruning the list of soundsources.

[basslinemaster]

Re loading times, I use a normal 2TB hard drive for the Omnisphere Steam folder (though I have an SSD for Windows 8.1, and the Omnisphere VST itself), and I find almost all sounds are playable in well under a second, and seem to load faster than should be possible, given the speed of my hard drive - i.e. a 400MB preset seems to load in under three seconds, but I watch the hard drive's throughput in Task Manager, and it doesn't go above 80MB/s. In other words, I have noticed no problems in loading times - the only time I see an obvious delay is if I open a project that uses Omnisphere, which has three or four, or more, different patches loaded in one instance, and the song starts playing without all the patches loaded initially, but they soon all load.

[Sparky77]

The update will only be an extra 13gb? Not that I'm complaining it's just that the original was almost 50 gb for 2700 sound sources, so 13gb is surprising for another 2000 sound sources. Maybe not as much multi-samples and perhaps instead there are a lot of single audio file sources, like the phrases to be used with granular.

I agree, it would be nice to see more of a new library.
At least you can import samples now.

[zvenx]

The update will only be an extra 13gb? Not that I'm complaining it's just that the original was almost 50 gb for 2700 sound sources, so 13gb is surprising for another 2000 sound sources. Maybe not as much multi-samples and perhaps instead there are a lot of single audio file sources, like the phrases to be used with granular.

......

But what seems strange is to have announced the total size and then afterwards talk about how they are only just pruning the list of soundsources.

Agreed. Sincerely hope size and not quality or usefulness ends up being the main criteria when choosing the final sound sources. Hard drives are cheap.
Rsp

[declan32001]

The update will only be an extra 13gb? Not that I'm complaining it's just that the original was almost 50 gb for 2700 sound sources, so 13gb is surprising for another 2000 sound sources. Maybe not as much multi-samples and perhaps instead there are a lot of single audio file sources, like the phrases to be used with granular.

......

But what seems strange is to have announced the total size and then afterwards talk about how they are only just pruning the list of soundsources.

Agreed. Sincerely hope size and not quality or usefulness ends up being the main criteria when choosing the final sound sources. Hard drives are cheap.
Rsp

Well, I'm conflicted. I'm all for getting NATO approval for soundsources . Omisphere's library expansion interests me less than the soundmatch/parameter lock feature so I will probably use more of it.

If I didn't own Trilian or RMX I'd wish Spectrasonics would put less emphasis on sampling in general, but they're really good at it, and I think they're fairly unique in that they create sounds which drive their technology and not the other way around.

They make complexity really easy.