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

[noiseboyuk]

Yes, agreed - presets it is. In the Sonic State video he talks about "but with Omni effects", I guess its possible the sound sources are dry. Shame its not the raw PCM files, but essentially any passing need I may have felt to have the Roland Cloud version has gone. Hey, even Digital Native Dance is in there.

I did like the patch Eric demo'd with 4 Omni soundsources that was D-50ish, that's the good stuff right there - taking the spirit of the old but also moving it on.

[beely]

Agreed!

And the reverb and chorus on the D50 was pretty poor, by todays standards, anyway.

[sinemotor]

So it's a bit like with UVI Digital Synsations where they sampled custom made D-50 patches.

[noiseboyuk]

So it's a bit like with UVI Digital Synsations where they sampled custom made D-50 patches.

Er, no.

Purely on the sampled sound sources, you could say that it's "like" Roland's Anthology 1987, in the sense that its sampled D-50 patches. But that ignores all the rest of Omnisphere, and assumes all you do is play the raw D-50 soundsources on a single layer without adjusting them in any way, never mind the other 5,500 soundsources, hundreds of wavetables, entire VA architecture etc etc.

[sinemotor]

Er, no.
Purely on the sampled sound sources, you could say that it's "like" Roland's Anthology 1987, in the sense that its sampled D-50 patches. But that ignores all the rest of Omnisphere, and assumes all you do is play the raw D-50 soundsources on a single layer without adjusting them in any way, never mind the other 5,500 soundsources, hundreds of wavetables, entire VA architecture etc etc.

Yeah, I've got Omnisphere 2. I was strictly talking about the way Spectrasonics added the D-50 "soundsources". Those are sampled presets from the famous D-50 patches. UVI did a similar thing except that they sampled custom patches which are less recognisable, probably to get away with copyright issues.

[noiseboyuk]

Indeed, but the UVI thing is not really like 2.6 in any way. Omni has the sampled original patches - like Anthology 1987 - so you have those, but you can then use them for anything else that Omni can do, or indeed use other sources within the architecture of the D-50.

[Examigan]

Indeed, but the UVI thing is not really like 2.6 in any way. Omni has the sampled original patches - like Anthology 1987 - so you have those, but you can then use them for anything else that Omni can do, or indeed use other sources within the architecture of the D-50.

But you can load UVI products like Digital Synsations into Falcon, even though they aren't the original patches that were sampled.

Anyway, I didn't really know too much about Omnisphere until just lately, and it looks really cool. The
hardware integration is really interesting.

[SJ_Digriz]

Indeed, but the UVI thing is not really like 2.6 in any way. Omni has the sampled original patches - like Anthology 1987 - so you have those, but you can then use them for anything else that Omni can do, or indeed use other sources within the architecture of the D-50.

The samples are different, the availability to use the entirety of Falcon with the included samples is the same. You could even save out all the samples and make your own versions. But editing the existing presets with new stuff from Falcon works too.

[deastman]

I don’t really find all this D-50 debate all that interesting, to be honest. These days you have plenty of other options. The Roland Cloud version sounds pretty good. I’ve got the D-05. And it isn’t like real D-50s are unobtainium either. I wonder how many people are actually going to be using PG-1000s to modify Omnisphere patches based on samples D-50 patches anyway? Okay, it would be a nice freebie to have a complete D-50 inside Omnisphere for no additional charge, but that doesn’t seem realistic. Anyway, with Omnisphere you can go way beyond what any of the old LA synths were capable of, and still maintain the same sort of feel as those vintage D-50 patches.

[noiseboyuk]

The more synths Omni covers, the more you see what they are thinking I guess. Pretty soon damn near everything with a midi socket will hook up to Omni, and it's kinda fun. There's a LOT of owners of synths out there, old and new. That means a lot of people to potentially be tempted to try out a VI even if they've never had one before. Spectrasonics get to have a great relationship with the hardware manufacturers as, from the other side, people might by the hardware to go with their software.

All this discussion over the D-50... it's just one synth out of 60 in just one part of Omnisphere. It's a behemoth. What's appealing to me though is that despite covering ever more ground and being ever more useful in ever more scenarios, its still sort of idiosyncratic. It's not a workstation. It's a synth with its own flavour, its own way of doing things. Some aspects do drive me mad - TAGS - but the truth is if every other synth I owned vanished from my hard drive tomorrow, I'd be just fine. And I REALLY like a lot of them.

[Examigan]

In one of the videos I saw Eric said something about the sounds being modeled. So are they all sampled and they sometimes use wavetables, or are they just modeled sounds, or a combination of both?

[beely]

I don’t really find all this D-50 debate all that interesting, to be honest.

Not much debate, we're just talking about a nice feature in an upcoming update.

These days you have plenty of other options. The Roland Cloud version sounds pretty good. I’ve got the D-05. And it isn’t like real D-50s are unobtainium either. I wonder how many people are actually going to be using PG-1000s to modify Omnisphere patches based on samples D-50 patches anyway?

There's weren't other options (apart from real D50/550) until last year, when we got both the plugin, and the new D05, so yer, it's not as exciting a feature as it would have been had we not had other options. The cloud plugin is a perfect D50 and loads all the patches around, so that's great.

Okay, it would be a nice freebie to have a complete D-50 inside Omnisphere for no additional charge, but that doesn’t seem realistic. Anyway, with Omnisphere you can go way beyond what any of the old LA synths were capable of, and still maintain the same sort of feel as those vintage D-50 patches.

Agree, and that's really the point. You can do D50-like things, without the limitations of the D50 (eg, filtering the samples, using different samples etc) and with the significant extra stuff. The hardware profile patches are a good example of D50 type patches taken further than you could do on the hardware. Even Eric's not interested in just putting a D50 in Omnisphere, he's interested in taking the nice character somewhere new.

We were just interested in clarifying some details that weren't initially specified - now we have.

[beely]

In one of the videos I saw Eric said something about the sounds being modeled. So are they all sampled and they sometimes use wavetables, or are they just modeled sounds, or a combination of both?

It all depends on the hardware. Usually, they sample the oscillator waveshapes of the source synth. In some cases they've had to add new filters to match the capabilities of the hardware, and they sometimes have to implement new features (eg the D50 Bias controls) to make the hardware meaningfully control Omnisphere as expected from the controls.

It depends what they need to do to get a reasonably close match, using a combination of features Omnisphere has on offer, and the source synth.

[Examigan]

Ok thanks. Whatever they did, it sounds really good in the two videos I checked out.

[rob_lee]

I've had Omnisphere v1 sitting in the box for 8yrs or so but I decided to check out the new 2.6 video here below and I'm definitely upgrading when it's released. I could spend 24/7 on this thing and it's handy if you have some of the hardware to go with it. $249 upgrade is a bargain for what this is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoPbGYaWli0