Omnisphere Power Synth Virtual Instrument

This synth is probably even deeper than most people say it is (and they say it's deep). To be honest, I've barely even tapped into making my own sounds based off the samples they provide. I'm still swimming in the patches they already created. However, if you can think of it, you can probably create it. It takes a lot of experimenting and reading, but this is a solid synth that should be on the top of your list if you want ambient/electronic/dark/heavy/distorted/lead/pad/impacting/etc sounds. I was also very impressed with the human voices and traditional sounds they provided..I was having more fun with the jazz singers than I care to admit :). Plus, try the church organ sample, add some reverb, and a dark texture. My family found it amusing I was hunched over the keyboard menacingly like a super villain while playing 'Toccata und Fugue' in D minor (speakers all the way up of course). Bottom line, if you love interesting sounds and love tinkering with sounds, this is an instrument you must have. I haven't tried using the live mode live yet, but I'm anxious to try it!

I'm a breaks and electro producer. I was getting frustrated with the $100-$200 synths I was buying. A lot of them seem specifically geared to dubstep and DnB. I decided I needed to buy a pro synth if I wanted to do this right.This synth is beyond amazing. The stock sounds it comes with are varied and spectacular. In addition, you can quickly and deeply customize the sounds . If you want to spend a lot of time programming this synth, you can come up with some incredible, evolving patches. The variety of modulatable controls and the control over the envelopes is...i'm running out of adjectives here...truly impressive.One caveat, it IS a resource hog. I can only load two instances per song (using the stack feature [which is awesome!]). I have a MacBook Pro 5.1 with 2.4 GHxz speed and 4 gigs RAM. If you have a beefier machine, may work better for you.tldr; buy this thing.

Omnisphere's biggest selling point is it's ease of use. As far as I can tell, there are no sounds in Omnisphere that you could not create in other sound design programs ... but Omnisphere's Interface is extremely accessible, and with minimal knowledge of technical matters, you can quickly slap together some very clean, interesting instruments.When you try to go beneath the surface of the interface, however, difficulties appear. For one thing there is no information available in the reference guide, or at the website, on what the various switches and knobs actually do. If you are well skilled in electronic instrument construction, this will probably not be much of a problem, as the LFOs, filters, and so on are little different than those found in other software. But you will have to take the time to sort it all out.On the other hand the arrangement of the devices is unusual, with the synthesizers and samplers being collected into groupings called "layers" and "multis". Instructions on how to organize these are entirely missing, and while the built-in library patches are very easy to use, it is hard to create and install your own. I find that I can produce the same sounds much faster in my DAW, just by using single sound patches and mixing them together. In other words, I find myself using Omnisphere to find something close to what I want ... and then if I feel that I must improve on that, I switch over and build my own in the DAW.It's hard to get across how bad the user guide is when compared to other, similar, products. For example, yesterday I accidentally came across a note at the web site that says you should create Logic tracks for Omnisphere as "8 voice multi-timbral". That's a really important note, because if you don't do it, your mixing setup is wrong ... you would think that the need to change the default creation setup in a major DAW would have been front and center in the reference guide. But I can't find it in there anywhere.The sounds supplied with Omnisphere are of excellent quality. There do not seem to be significantly more of them than are supplied with the libraries of other programs, nor does there seem to be a way to add additional sounds to the Omnisphere library. (The website offers about fifteen "legacy" sound sample packages on CDs, but it doesn't say if they would work as Omnisphere patches or not.)The patch browser is an interesting innovation that lets you quickly search the library by keywords. On the other hand, if you do succeed in creating your own patches, the library stores them in a folder which you must access separately in the browser, thus limiting your ability to compare them to the Omnisphere patches.There are a number of gadgets intended to augment live performance. I haven't used these, and can't comment on them. (The Orb certainly looks like fun, but I don't know how useful it actually might be.)I may change my mind over time as I learn how to put multis together, but for now, all in all, I don't find Omnisphere worth the price. It saves me time when I need a particular kind of sound, and need it in a hurry, but creating new instruments is such a frustrating process that I now only experiment with it when I have the time. I don't hate the software, but I wouldn't buy it again at the same price.

issue with spectra Sonics and have tried on several of my windows power house systems loaded with the best i7 processors and 64 gig ram on laptops and desktop. These are only tested and working on Mac systems not Pc. The company has spent hours of my time on the phone trying Rj help resolve issue but they have kids from Best Buy taking tech support calls and do not know what the heck they are doing or taking about. Very defensive company and they do not issue a refund. My native instruments and IK all work flawless except for these idiots.

Spectrasonics Omnisphere is the best synth on the market. It's great for new sounds, not traditional piano, bass and guitar sounds. It does though have piano, bass and guitar sounds, but they are like no other. The thousands of sounds will keep you busy for a long time. I love the arppegiator. Great layering of sounds and plenty of room to create your own. When I first downloaded it (almost 6 hours of downloading) it wouldn't work until I went to Spectrasonics website and upgraded to the latest version. Then everything worked great. I can't seem to be able to stop using it.

Though nearly 500 dollars is a lot to shell out for a VST at first glance, Omnisphere is not your average synth at all. This thing is, to me, so many great software synths thrown into one. The presets on here, alone, are amazing and you can spend hours just going through the entire list and playing all of the sounds out. The synth engine is great, too. I think Omnisphere is pretty suitable for any musical need. It's got lots of synth sounds for pop, dance and what have you, pads for ambient, strings for orchestral, great sounds for industrial music, etc. It's just incredible.