We are excited to announce another significant update of our flagship software synthesizer Omnisphere®. Version 2.6 adds an enhanced Arpeggiator and dramatically expanded Hardware Synth Integration, with support for over 60 Hardware Synths! This update adds brand new profiles for such iconic synths as the Roland Juno-106, Alesis Andromeda and the Roland D-50, to the very latest synths like the Korg Minilogue XD and Moog One - as well as dozens of other user requested models. The FREE update will also include hundreds of inspiring new patches for all registered Omnisphere 2 users and will be available in March.
Major Arpeggiator Update
Omnisphere’s renowned Arpeggiator has been greatly enhanced with all new creative tools, a brand new preset library and much more. The musical possibilities are vastly expanded, making it one of the most flexible arpeggiators ever, while still being fun to use. Best of all, Omnisphere 2.6 can now capture the MIDI data of what the arpeggiator is doing as a standard MIDI file, which can be dragged to any DAW for further editing!
Expanded Hardware Synth Integration
Omnisphere’s unique Hardware Synth Integration feature bridges the physical experience gap between software and hardware, giving users intuitive control of Omnisphere by using the familiar layout of their hardware synth. With the new 2.6 release, many requested hardware synth profiles have been added, including support for over 60 popular hardware synthesizers from Moog®, Sequential®, Roland®, Korg®, Novation®, Nord®, Behringer®, Access®, Studiologic® and Yamaha®. The supported hardware synths cover a wide array of form factors and price ranges for different types of users.
New Sounds
Omnisphere 2.6 features a newly expanded “Hardware Library” with hundreds of new patches created by Eric Persing and our renowned Sound Development team. Notably, this update takes Eric’s classic sound design work from the original 1987 Roland D-50 into completely new sonic territory with Omnisphere’s vast synthesis capabilities.
New Hardware Synth Profiles added in v2.6 include:
• Roland Juno-106
• Roland D-50/PG-1000
• Alesis Andromeda A6
• Behringer Deepmind
• Access Virus Indigo 1
• Access Virus Indigo 2
• Access Virus C
• Access Virus TI
• DSI/Sequential Pro 2
• DSI/Sequential Prophet 08
• DSI/Sequential Mopho
• Roland JP-8000
• Roland JP-8080
• Roland Gaia
• Roland JD-Xi
• Roland SH-201
• Nord Wave
• Nord Lead 3
• Nord Lead 4
• Nord Lead A1
• Nord Stage 3
• Moog One
• Moog Minitaur
• Korg MicroKorg
• Korg MicroKorg XL
• Korg Minilogue XD
• Korg MS-20i
• Korg MS-2000
• Novation MiniNova
• Yamaha Reface CS
*complete list of new features and supported synths will be announced upon the official release in March 2019.
Pricing and Availability
Omnisphere 2.6 is a FREE update to all registered Omnisphere 2 users!
Official Release March 2019
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 24, 2019 11:36 am
by kpc
Very nice. Have to give it to Spectrasonics - they always provide a lot of stuff in their free updates. (still no word on RMX, though). Looking forward to the D50 stuff, since mine has some issues with the output.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 24, 2019 12:27 pm
by playz123
Finally an update to the arpeggiator! Long we have waited!
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 24, 2019 12:40 pm
by Guy Rowland
Looks like another solid update, eh? The D-50 caught my eye too. When I watched that D-50 video, I realised how much Eric added to the mini sampled waveforms, so the idea he’s taken than on and further is more interesting to me than a real D-50. I wonder if they’ll have a few more soundsources to build on there though, as there’s only a handful currently.
(I used a great patch the other day that was a hardware one, it was really interesting to see how it was made up in the 4 layers. Not the usual way of programming Omni, and I really do like the different paths it takes you down).
Drag and drop from Arp to DAW - yum. Bring on the NAMM video.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 24, 2019 2:49 pm
by Guy Rowland
Just noticed...
• Korg MS-20i
...aaaand I appear to have immediately bought one for £100 on eBay. Say hello to my new Omnisphere controller.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 24, 2019 5:20 pm
by The Saxer
• Korg MS-20i
I didn't expect Spectrasonics to add the MS-20i because it's no longer manufactured for years. This is really great! I already have one of those too. This will be big fun!
The original Korg soft-MS20 is really dated and my MS-20i keeps it's miserable existence as an articulation switcher. So there's new cyber live ahead in the body of an Omnisphere!
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 24, 2019 5:44 pm
by Guy Rowland
You'll have to give me any tips, Saxer, as an old hand. Korg have promised to update the UIs on all their legacy synths, that would really help.
As an Omni controller, this makes more sense than any other really in that there's no audio you're paying for and not using. And there's obviously tons of fun to be had with the modulation. I have a feeling their 2nd hand value is about to go up considerably, hence me barely thinking twice at paying £100 in good condition. (There's a bit of coming full circle for me here - my older brother used to own an MS10 and an MS20 way back around 1980 I think)
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 24, 2019 8:08 pm
by The Saxer
The original MS-20 was actually my first synth in the eighties too. At that time the main job of synths was what samplers do today: trying to emulate real instruments. When people was listening to synths in music at that time the standard question was: And what instrument shall that be? If the answer was 'a flute' or 'a trumpet' everything was fine. Without an answer they looked irritated. I used the MS-20 with my 4-track Fostex cassette recorder and a Fricke MFB 501 drum computer with dip switches in a kind of tupperware box. Painful job to program it. I sold the MS-20 later to afford a poly synth.
The MS-20i has a patch bay for a kind of modular approach. It really works with the legacy soft MS-20 and I expect Omnisphere to do so too. But actually I feel kind of silly patching cables that are just dummy cables to tell the software what to modulate. Some things are done easier with a mouse click. But for direct access to knobs and faders it's really great. I have the Roland boutique SE-02 which already has an Omni hardware profile. I can forget in seconds that I'm programming Omni instead of the synth itself. But the MS-20i is much more ergonomic. Really looking forward to reanimate it!
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 25, 2019 9:54 am
by Guy Rowland
Roll up roll up, first NAMM video from Spectrasonics' James Bernard:
And here's a better screenshot to show the new arpeggiator interface:
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 26, 2019 4:23 am
by Guy Rowland
...and another, this one from Sound on Sound with Eric Persing, covering mostly the Juno 106, D-50 and new arpeggiator. Looks like they really went to town with the D50 - they've added keyboard bias controls to Omnisphere that were part of the original D-50 architecture, they've added a lot of the D-50 soundsources*, captured the analogue waveforms as wavetables and created new D-50 style patches with them.
*Eric says that the original PCM files are called Soundsources in Omni - it's not 100% clear to me if these are the actual original tiny transients from the D-50 ROM or are bigger chunks, as it were.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 26, 2019 3:06 pm
by Guy Rowland
Last one, promise - probably the best single showcase of the 3 videos. Clear here that it's D-50 presets as sound sources, not the original tiny PCM transients.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 26, 2019 4:17 pm
by kpc
Jiminy Cricket! How the hell are we supposed to keep track of everything this does? It’s going to take me a lifetime to get through it all. I’ve been meaning to carve out the time to really dig in and figure OmniSphere out.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 26, 2019 5:43 pm
by Guy Rowland
kpc wrote: ↑Jan 26, 2019 4:17 pm
Jiminy Cricket! How the hell are we supposed to keep track of everything this does? It’s going to take me a lifetime to get through it all. I’ve been meaning to carve out the time to really dig in and figure OmniSphere out.
I suppose you could argue that the whole hardware integration thing is one answer to this MY GOD ITS SO FRICKIN HUGE problem. It may be a first world problem, but a problem it nonetheless is. Rather than try and make a hardware controller do it all, they turned it around and said let's make what you've already got do some new tricks. Let's pretend its a D-50 on steroids, in this case.
WARNING - PRETENTIOUS PARAGRAPH ALERT
I'm a big believer in limitations being a creative tool. Boundless choice can be sterile and too overwhelming to really hook into. In the original script for Back To The Future, the denouement was supposed to take place in a nuclear test site, and they try to get the nuclear explosion to generate the 1.21 gigawatts the car needs to go back to 1985. However, when in development they realised they needed to cut corners, and the big set piece at the end was prime target. Could they think of something that worked as well but with stuff they already had as part of the production? Thus was the lightning strike on the Clock Tower born. It's unthinkable now... the original ending would have been terrible next to what they ended up with, and they worked the whole thing seamlessly into the script. If they'd have bottomless resources, they'd likely never have made that creative - and far better - choice.
It seems to me that this is part of the appeal of Hardware Integration. By consciously limiting Omnisphere in all these different ways, you get to create stuff you'd never have thought of. Which is all well and good... if you have all the hardware just lying around. All of us get the great patches that result from that workflow at the moment, but I still think that's only 50% there... until that dream day of a true universal controller with a dynamic display and physical controls, we're a bit stuck. My experiments with Lemur were totally convincing to me conceptually that being able to flick from one model to another and design patches using those specific subset of tailor made controls was a wondrous thing. Pity the touchscreen and especially the flaky wifi connection in Windows put paid to it.
A little tangential (again) but directly relevant to me with a non-shiny old controller on the way that will be in Omni 2.6, I found this superb video on the MS20 the other day, producing a seemingly polyphonic ambient pad using just an old 2 oscillator mono synth. The end result is gorgeous. Creativity through limitations.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 26, 2019 9:21 pm
by Geoff Grace
I see your point, Guy, and certainly your Back To The Future example provides a good illustration. That said, I don't miss the days when all I had was a piano, a cassette deck, a pen and pencil, and blank staves to write on. Perhaps we want to put a limit on those limitations then?
I often see this argument applied to The Beatles, citing the limited gear they had at their disposal. But of course, at that point in time, no musician had ever had more technology to play with.
Personally, I'll take today's kit over that of any time in the past, but I can understand why YMMV. After all, I've never been more prolific than I was with just a piano and a cassette deck. But back then, I rarely took the time to arrange my ideas. Now, I arrange them almost any way the mood strikes.
Best,
Geoff
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 26, 2019 10:02 pm
by Geoff Grace
Re: the version 2.6 arpeggiator, I think it might be fun to export some of those innovative patterns as MIDI files and see how they work with orchestral libraries to create unusual ostinato patterns...
Best,
Geoff
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 27, 2019 3:26 am
by Guy Rowland
Of course there’s an argument that a guitar or a pencil and paper can and have produced the most stunning compositions, but I guess what is interesting me here is that even with today’s vast array of choice and complexity, we need artificial constraints to aid the creative process. We do this all the time as composers, when we pick a particular instrument for a particular sound, or restricting instruments in a project. With synthesis, I’ve argued for years that the big deal about hardware is not really to do with the sound it makes, but rather the specific architecture that pushes you down certain creative paths. Then as the MS20 video shows, the desire to bend or break those paths - this is a monosyth, it can’t do ambient pads - has its own rewards.
That’s why Hardware Integraion feels new and exciting to me. I love the idea of imposing all these different architectures on to the same basic synth, it feels very in sync with how humans fumble through the creative process.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 27, 2019 4:06 am
by Lawrence
I was in and out of synth repair shops through the 70s and 80s. The wonderful people at the Moog factory in Williamsville, NY (a four hour drive each way for me) replaced practically every part in my Poly Moog, and it still broke often. I played bass synth in front of 15,000 people and my Micromoog went a varying 3-5 semitones out of tune throughout the show. My Oberheim OBX-a visited the repair center often.
Nostalgia? Er....not on my part. I like software-a lot.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 27, 2019 11:18 am
by Geoff Grace
Our discussion on limitations has me thinking of the book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. While its focus is consumerism, some of its points are related.
Best,
Geoff
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 28, 2019 6:29 am
by Guy Rowland
Just posted this on the ongoing thread over at KVR. Still think there's mileage in a tablet-based approach as a stopgap until a proper universal hardware controller is developed. Its nothing like the same tactile experience, but in the light of our conversation here regarding restrictions being a breeding ground for creativity, this very nicely channels you down the programming paths of these synths.
----
Despite my real actual physical MS-20iC being on the way, I found myself playing with tablet control again at the weekend in quiet moments. I've given up on Lemur as a) being too flaky on Windows, b) insanely complicated and c) now unsupported, so I'm trying out Midi Designer Pro 2. I've made it work nicely in Windows using a cabled connection and the MusicIO app. MusicIO needs iTunes installed, but not necessarily running, to work, and you need to put dummy midi and audio channels in the DAW - the audio channel hosts the MusicIO VST plugin that communicates with the iPad, the midi plugin needs to be set to input monitor and fed to Omnisphere (I figured it was a bad idea to add this new virtual midi input to All Midi Inputs in Cubase and feed random CCs to literally every plugin in the project).
It's MUCH nicer to use than Lemur, and is mostly nicer on the eye graphically (annoying that there's no waverform icons though). I've had one total loss of communication which required a complete iPad reset, but that might be related to a dodgy value I sent accidentally. Apart from that its been rock solid. Thus far just done a couple of low hanging fruit plugins, the JU-06 and VP-03 boutique synths:
I'm not going to go crazy on this, but as a background activity I'll probably plug away at hardware profiles that look interesting. There's a nice SE-02 on the Midi Designer website that already works really well, but surprisingly few others. There's a Prophet 12 but I find it really messy.
Obviously its not hardware, but its still a good experience to program along the specific lines of the hardware models, it was very quick to create a few nice patches that were very evocative of those two synths. Hardware Integration works great.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 28, 2019 12:49 pm
by wst3
I may regret reading this post!!!
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 28, 2019 7:00 pm
by Luciano Storti
+1 fo Midi designer. Have been using it for about a year and quite like it. There’s plenty of layouts to play with and if you take a little time to understand its implementation, you can design your own simple layouts covering your own needs. My only reason for not using it as often as I could, is that I already use the large iPad for CC/score editing and the small one for Metagrid.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 28, 2019 9:35 pm
by wst3
Now look what you clowns have done... MIDI Designer looks very cool - and like a black hole for time!
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 29, 2019 3:33 am
by Guy Rowland
There are a few synth templates on Midi Designer for some of the bigger synths either already supported or coming, such as the aforementioned Prophet 12, the D-50 / PG 1000 or the Prophet X. The trouble is that these sorts of synths are so mind bogglingly complex that the MD templates have scores of pages filled with small fiddly controls and hundreds of scroll wheels with endless modulation options. At some point you realise "hold on, Omnisphere is miles easier to control than this!"
The D-50 is an interesting example there. There are hundreds of parameters. That PG 1000 is deceptive - there's loads of sliders, but already we're in a world of multiple functions for them. It takes serious commitment and dedication to mastering that sort of multi-layered architecture, and sure you will be rewarded by your own D-50ish patches if you do it, but the rest of us will find Omnisphere so much easier even if it lacks those walls to keep your options more restricted.
That led me to a new bizarre idea. What if Omni's Hardware Integration had an optional mode that greys out all of Omni's functionality that is not covered by that particular profile? Just the wavetables and filters used in the synth, just those (relatively few) modulation options. I'd far rather work on D-50 patches that way!
As it is, when I think about it what I respond to with hardware is the idea of one control, one function - there's the cutoff, there's a mod switch, there's a wave shape changer. So really, those are the synths I'm most interested in with the Midi Designer / Omni combo. Something on a couple of pages at most where you can explore a synths individual characteristics without needing to devote a year to it.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 29, 2019 12:47 pm
by wst3
I'm in complete agreement Guy, except I'd shoot for a single page. Granted the face of my Arp 2600 and Korg MS-20 are significantly larger than my iPad, I still get so much work done with them, and if I am using software versions it takes longer.
Re: Omnisphere 2.6 announced
Posted: Jan 29, 2019 5:06 pm
by Guy Rowland
You might like this one, Bill, a one page wonder:
Just need to do a bit more testing with that one. The OB-6 went up today, but that's a whole 3 pages. Well, 2 and a bit.
