The Sound Board

It's out today - 300 more patches of joy from the irritatingly talented Matt Bowdler, focusing on the lighter side of things this time.

Omnisphere Pangaea provides a rich source of mystical, hybrid ethnic plucked string and mallet instruments; subtle world rhythms; wistful vocal soundscapes and ethereal choirs; lush ambient textures; evocative digital synth pads; lyrical hybrid synth leads, and soulful arpeggios and sequences. Plus, there are tonal impacts, gentle pianos and soft, punchy basses.

There is also a Deluxe version of Pangaea, with a bonus 64 patches that use soundsources from the Trilian and Bob Moog Tribute libraries - which you will need to own to use them.

Omnisphere Pangaea is available for £39.99 +VAT. Omnisphere Pangaea Deluxe is £49.99 +VAT

...and Newsletter subscribers get 25% off until April 21st.

http://www.theunfinished.co.uk/shop/omnisphere-pangaea/

Congrats, Matt. Always love your sound sets for Omni. This is going on the list.

As I've always bought everything Unfinished for Omni or Zebra the day it's released... I wish there was a way to bypass all the hoopla for this and a few other select companies. Matt, I'll send you my wallet to hold, take what you need just send me the shit when it comes out. I wasted a solid 5 minutes of my morning not listening to any demos or walkthroughs and having chrome auto-fill my name and CC info in. Then another 2 minutes making this post. That's 7 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Chili - ha! Yeah, had 15 minutes on in the background before saying to myself "why am I doing this? Just buy the damn thing".

Now... I am SUCH a bore on this subject, I advise anyone not extremely interested in the intricacies of Omni tagging to skip to the next post right now. But I think I might be re-evaluating my buy-good-quality-Omni-soundsets policy. It's taking me so long to get them into a form that is even vaguely compatible with the factory library it's contravening my "life's too short" policy. For this, I lay the blame squarely at Spectrasonics's door, by screwing up the tagging so monumentally in Omni 2, essentially giving 3rd party developers little choice but to throw up their hands and say "sod this, I'm just doing my own thing". And sadly the end result for us users is a browser that looks like a vomit bomb has exploded in it.

In this case, my heart sunk mightily when I loaded up Pangaea and clicked the ARP-BPM category to start flicking through. The way Spectrasonics have decided to go is that every patch in this category as its own unique Type category. Anyone else would have an "analog" type, that might apply to a lead, a bass, an ARP. No, Spectrasonics have decided this isn't right at all, and have "analog tones" for some stuff, but for Arps, they go in "BPM Analog". This seems, on a fundamental level, to misunderstand how tags work. You click one for Arp, and another for Analog - ergo, you get Analog Arps. It's just nuts to create a specific type called BPM analog, which can only apply to one category - Arps and BPM. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

However, we're stuck with it. That's how the colossal factory library is, so I have to go through every patch removing, say, the "Analog Tones" tag from anything in the BPM and ARP category. If I don't I have another 50 attributes which doubles up what's already there.

So at once Matt I curse you, but in no way blame you. And I absolutely sympathise with keeping the Hybrid Instruments category they perversely removed from Omni 1. But I find with each 3rd party purchase - from anyone - I feel the urge to carry on doing this diminishes. At 15,000 patches.... have I finally had enough of all the bloody housekeeping?

So you want to be able to search all your libraries at once for a certain patch, hm? You know... that makes a lot of sense. Because of the way the tags are set up, it never even occurred to me because I know I'll miss half the patches. I don't have a ton of libraries but to me each library has a certain "quality" in my head, so when I'm browsing for a patch the FIRST thing I do is select an individual library which immediately narrows it down from who-knows-how-many-thousands to around a few hundred or so. Otherwise I get overwhelmed.

Probably doesn't help you much, I like your way better. When you're done tagging all your patches would you mind so much tagging mine as well? Thanks, birthday pal!

Perhaps we should check with Matt first... :-)

Yeah, I want that magic search ALL. Its never going to be perfect, but I'd like it to be vaguely useful. That said, I do often pick a library. The whole library thing is pretty crude in Omni - they added the fancy import thing that actually takes me longer than cutting and pasting it into the right place in the OS, but you can't search more than one library at once. I'd like to search ALL Matt's libraries, for example.

Back to the tagging...

I think I should just automatically buy these from now on. If I think about it for too long then I end up leaving it, since no one actually pays me to write music that needs it. The problem of course is that it's just the kind of music I love writing!

Anyway, I've just bought it. Glad to have contributed to Matt's nappy fund :-)

It's getting a lot of love here. I think Jonathan v.d. Wijngaarden's demo track is particularly gorgeous.

Well, yes Guy, you are indeed monumentally boring on this subject. I know people have been urging you to write a book, but let me tell you now, they're going to skip the fucking chapter on tagging in Omnisphere.

Guy Rowland wrote:I'd like to search ALL Matt's libraries, for example.

One thing I can think of is that you make one column "author" and select The Unfinished? Then the other three columns will be just looking at my patches. Should you wish to do such a thing... I couldn't possibly comment.

Thanks for all the lovely comments chaps, you're very kind. I know I've been naughty, taking time off from releasing stuff, but I do have a pile of things ready and waiting to be shoved out into my release schedule for 2017 and beyond.

So, yes, Chillbot, if you could set up a direct debit please...

TheUnfinished wrote:So, yes, Chillbot, if you could set up a direct debit please...

Whatever you want to do. I'll send you $500 if you send me everything you do for Zebra/Omni for the next 5 years.

Hey Matt,

As far as the Deluxe version. I have Trillian but not the Moog soundset. Will the Deluxe still operate with the Trillian sounds or should I skip the deluxe version this time around?

I picked up the Deluxe version without reading the fine print. I don't have Trillian or the Bob Moog Tribute, so these bonus patches are virtual doorstops at the moment. I'm not too fussed -- I don't mind supporting Matt, and in any case if I do ever decide to pick up either or both of those, I'll have some extra sounds to play with.

TheUnfinished wrote:Well, yes Guy, you are indeed monumentally boring on this subject. I know people have been urging you to write a book, but let me tell you now, they're going to skip the fucking chapter on tagging in Omnisphere.

But that IS my idea for the book, Matt. 20 chapters, and chapters 2-20 will all be named "...and that's another thing". My agent tells me it'll be bigger than 50 Shades. Can I put you down for the Foreword?

Annoyingly good idea about searching for author, I might just have to do that....

Kayle - you get three separate libraries with the deluxe - main, Trilian and Moog, so yes you can easily just install the bits you need. Me being me of course, my first action was to combine them all.

chillbot wrote:

TheUnfinished wrote:So, yes, Chillbot, if you could set up a direct debit please...

Whatever you want to do. I'll send you $500 if you send me everything you do for Zebra/Omni for the next 5 years.

That deal ain't gonna fly.

kpc wrote:Hey Matt,

As far as the Deluxe version. I have Trillian but not the Moog soundset. Will the Deluxe still operate with the Trillian sounds or should I skip the deluxe version this time around?

You'll be able to use the 32 bonus patches that use Trilian soundsources but, obviously, not the Moog ones.

Thanks Matt. I wasn't sure if they required both soundsets