Omnisphere 3

[Geoff Grace]

Thanks for the review Guy!

Yes. Thanks, Guy!

Best,

Geoff

[Lawrence]

My thanks as well, Guy.

Anecdotally, it looks like Omni 3 will work on Monterey and doesn’t take much disk space for the app (can anyone confirm the latter?)

The remaining upgrade issue for me-my Steam folder presently exists on my boot drive which is extremely challenged space-wise. Is it possible to move it to another drive as well as the Omni 3 content?

[Jaap]

My thanks as well, Guy.

Anecdotally, it looks like Omni 3 will work on Monterey and doesn’t take much disk space for the app (can anyone confirm the latter?)

The remaining upgrade issue for me-my Steam folder presently exists on my boot drive which is extremely challenged space-wise. Is it possible to move it to another drive as well as the Omni 3 content?

Yes that's quite easy Larry and here a link from Spectrasonics on how to do it: https://support.spectrasonics.net/manua ... age04.html

[Lawrence]

My thanks as well, Guy.

Anecdotally, it looks like Omni 3 will work on Monterey and doesn’t take much disk space for the app (can anyone confirm the latter?)

The remaining upgrade issue for me-my Steam folder presently exists on my boot drive which is extremely challenged space-wise. Is it possible to move it to another drive as well as the Omni 3 content?

Yes that's quite easy Larry and here a link from Spectrasonics on how to do it: https://support.spectrasonics.net/manua ... age04.html

Thanks Jaap.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I don’t have the initial space on my boot drive to do the installation. I have plenty of external drive space but very little on my boot drive, hence the installation problem.

[Guy Rowland]

Larry, I'm 97% sure you can set your download location wherever you like. The app itself is tiny, you need 65gb space somewhere to download it temporarily and another 65gb in your STEAM folder to install it

[Jaap]

Oh I thought you wanted to move the whole STEAM folder, my apologies as I understood it wrong then I think.
What Guy said is true as I also did that. You can download the update to any location you want and when you install it, it will look automatically for the location of your STEAM folder. The installer and STEAM folder don't need to be at the same place.

[tack]

The fact that the mini patch browser doesn't remember your current category and sort order (and probably other settings) between project reloads is frustrating. I definitely see what you mean Guy about this release being a UX travesty where patch management is concerned. That was never exactly Omnisphere's strong suite but you'd expect some sort of forward progress between major releases.

[Guy Rowland]

Jason (or anyone else frustrated with the browsing experience) - please do add your name to the VI-C thread here - https://vi-control.net/community/thread ... er.167319/ . There's not all that much interest, and I've been told in no uncertain terms by many people the problem lies with me and they have no issues with how things are whatsoever.

It's a bit exhausting tbh. Thought I had a relatively simple to execute idea, in keeping with the Spectrasonics house style, that would genuinely benefit everyone. Turns out I'm just a boring PITA (yeah, I know). I've abandoned KVR completely (probably 20 years overdue).

[Lawrence]

Larry, I'm 97% sure you can set your download location wherever you like. The app itself is tiny, you need 65gb space somewhere to download it temporarily and another 65gb in your STEAM folder to install it

Thanks Guy-

The problem is that I don’t have a 65 gig available on my boot drive. Does the STEAM folder have to exist on the boot drive?

[Guy Rowland]

Larry, I'm 97% sure you can set your download location wherever you like. The app itself is tiny, you need 65gb space somewhere to download it temporarily and another 65gb in your STEAM folder to install it

Thanks Guy-

The problem is that I don’t have a 65 gig available on my boot drive. Does the STEAM folder have to exist on the boot drive?

No, it can go anywhere.

It will default to where it is now, is yours currently on the boot drive? Do you have any of Trilian, Keyscape, the Moog library or the Sonic Extensions? If so you could move all of that now. On first launch it will say it can't find STEAM and ask you where it is. You point that and you're done. Omni 3 will then just overwrite data in the same folder seamlessly.

If you only have Omni and don't move STEAM now, I'm pretty sure you can choose another location when you install, but you will then have a pointless 30gb or so of your Omni 1 STEAM folder boot drive location taking up precious space which you'd want to manually delete. In other words, you may as well move it all now to wherever you need it to be even if you only have Omnishphere.

Note - unlike Kontakt, Omnisphere CAN make use of the full speed of the drive on which the STEAM folder sits, so the faster the better.

[Lawrence]

Larry, I'm 97% sure you can set your download location wherever you like. The app itself is tiny, you need 65gb space somewhere to download it temporarily and another 65gb in your STEAM folder to install it

Thanks Guy-

The problem is that I don’t have a 65 gig available on my boot drive. Does the STEAM folder have to exist on the boot drive?

No, it can go anywhere.

It will default to where it is now, is yours currently on the boot drive? Do you have any of Trilian, Keyscape, the Moog library or the Sonic Extensions? If so you could move all of that now. On first launch it will say it can't find STEAM and ask you where it is. You point that and you're done. Omni 3 will then just overwrite data in the same folder seamlessly.

If you only have Omni and don't move STEAM now, I'm pretty sure you can choose another location when you install, but you will then have a pointless 30gb or so of your Omni 1 STEAM folder boot drive location taking up precious space which you'd want to manually delete. In other words, you may as well move it all now to wherever you need it to be even if you only have Omnishphere.

Note - unlike Kontakt, Omnisphere CAN make use of the full speed of the drive on which the STEAM folder sits, so the faster the better.

Thank you, Guy! I do have Trilian, Omni 1, Stylus, Moog etc now-if I can move the STEAM folder to an external drive without consequence, that would be perfect. I have so many projects that use Trilian and Omnisphere-I’m sure you can understand my trepidation.

Initially, I put a LOT of things on my boot drive including Komplete, which takes up a huge amount of space. My older iMac is limited to Thunderbolt 3 EXCEPT for the boot drive, which is soldered in and uses a PCI lane, so it’s my fastest.

I’m paying the price now. If possible, I’ll probably be looking to move Komplete soon as well as I have plenty of external drive space. My fear is the same-messing up existing projects.

[Guy Rowland]

Thank you, Guy! I do have Trilian, Omni 1, Stylus, Moog etc now-if I can move the STEAM folder to an external drive without consequence, that would be perfect. I have so many projects that use Trilian and Omnisphere-I’m sure you can understand my trepidation.

Initially, I put a LOT of things on my boot drive including Komplete, which takes up a huge amount of space. My older iMac is limited to Thunderbolt 3 EXCEPT for the boot drive, which is soldered in and uses a PCI lane, so it’s my fastest.

I’m paying the price now. If possible, I’ll probably be looking to move Komplete soon as well as I have plenty of external drive space. My fear is the same-messing up existing projects.

Go for it! Move the entire folder, launch and re-point. If there is some hiccup or performance issue, it is as simple as moving it back.

[Lawrence]

Thank you, Guy! I do have Trilian, Omni 1, Stylus, Moog etc now-if I can move the STEAM folder to an external drive without consequence, that would be perfect. I have so many projects that use Trilian and Omnisphere-I’m sure you can understand my trepidation.

Initially, I put a LOT of things on my boot drive including Komplete, which takes up a huge amount of space. My older iMac is limited to Thunderbolt 3 EXCEPT for the boot drive, which is soldered in and uses a PCI lane, so it’s my fastest.

I’m paying the price now. If possible, I’ll probably be looking to move Komplete soon as well as I have plenty of external drive space. My fear is the same-messing up existing projects.

Go for it! Move the entire folder, launch and re-point. If there is some hiccup or performance issue, it is as simple as moving it back.

Is it actually a matter of moving as opposed to copying?
Sorry for all the questions, I’ve always left the STEAM folder right where it was installed.

[Guy Rowland]

Is it actually a matter of moving as opposed to copying?
Sorry for all the questions, I’ve always left the STEAM folder right where it was installed.

You can do either, of course you ultimately want to liberate space, but you can do it further down the road. So if you're nervous just copy and rename your system drive STEAM folder to xSTEAM or something - Omnisphere will immediately throw up its hands in horror on its next launch and say its gone missing. Then you point it at your new location. If all is well after a couple of week's use, then permanently delete the old folder and get all that lovely space back.

[Lawrence]

Is it actually a matter of moving as opposed to copying?
Sorry for all the questions, I’ve always left the STEAM folder right where it was installed.

You can do either, of course you ultimately want to liberate space, but you can do it further down the road. So if you're nervous just copy and rename your system drive STEAM folder to xSTEAM or something - Omnisphere will immediately throw up its hands in horror on its next launch and say its gone missing. Then you point it at your new location. If all is well after a couple of week's use, then permanently delete the old folder and get all that lovely space back.

Awesome. Thanks so much for the help!

[dbh]

I use Omni 2 all the time but have always thought that its browser and search system, left a lot to be desired.

One example was how crap the search was - I remembered liking a Phillip Glass soprano thing so typed in "Glass Soprano" .. not a sausage until you get the words in order from the title ("Phillip's Glass Staccato Soprano").. yes, I eventually found it but I think in this day and age a search should be more flexible than that.

Another was the rigamarole for saving your own "Projects", or adding things to them, or renaming them .. when I haven't done it in a few months it's always a ballache to remember how to do it as it's not intuitive at all (at least for me).

If the browser and search have taken a turn for the worst I'll hold off and see if they improve.

[Guy Rowland]

For anyone interested in the many browser issues, I'll be sending this to Spectrasonics later today after some good input from the VI-C people. Here's a summary:

1. DEFAULT DIRECTORY
Users are more or less forced into completing 2 steps before being able to use the browser for pretty much anything. The ability to set a default to bypass this - say, to All Omnisphere - has been removed. This has a number of knock on effects:

2. BROWSE BY CATEGORY
A side effect of (1) is it is not possible to jump straight to broad categories, say, Guitars.

3. SEARCH BOX
The search box is now hidden but always active. It is not available at all until the 2-step process has been done (so dbh you couldn't put anything at all into the search box until that is done).

4. BROWSE BY TYPE
It is no longer possible to scroll the complete list of types (now called Keyword) until that the 2-step process is done.

5. MULTIPLE DIRECTORIES
Unlike other fields, it is not possible to search more than category at a time. Everything is now strictly one directory at a time and it takes as long as it takes.

6. THE DEMISE OF ALL.
Searching "All" is now a confusing mess, and All Spectrasonics has been removed entirely.

7. FEATURE REQUEST - CUSTOM VIEWS
As a result of (6), a proposal to have the user choose and name lists of categories to speed up the search process. Useful purely within Omni, it becomes even more so with other Spectrasonics products and Third Party. It would even enable a full OMNI 2 MODE, re-creating the Omni 2 experience fully within Omni 3.

Full details here - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e79fbciy ... ytm4i&dl=0

[Jaap]

I am way deep in a bespoke project for Omnisphere and have only worked with my custom sound design stuff and the new FX, features etc and have not looked at the browser much, but based on what I read, I think you make some excellent points Guy.

[Guy Rowland]

The request document is in – got a nice couple of friendly replies from Spectrasonics – we watch this space.

Posted this today on VI-C

-

Was just looking for something, and found a very good example of why the new browser is such a poor experience for me.

I wanted a Guitar ARP. This category has been moved from ARP+BPM into Guitars, sub category Guitars BPM. OK, I can get used to that.

This returns 6 results, which seems awfully low. There were some old familiars I was looking for and couldn't see there - where did they go? So I next did a search in All Legacy under BPM Guitar, the old factory library. I can still easily do that and it returned a slightly more healthy 25, but still not one I was looking for - Acousti-Chord Shimmer. Hmm... why not? They wouldn't have tagged it with something else back in Omni 2 would they?

At this point, short of going through every individual library one by one, I'm almost out of options. I did try to search among the wreckage in ALL, but initially I couldn't even find BPM Guitar - it had just vanished! It turned out this is because the Type field used in earlier versions had been replaced by Keyword. You have to manually replace it in the column header.

In short - you have to click a lot and have a really good knowledge of how the old system works to find what you need.

So out of curiosity I fired up the laptop which still has Omni 2 on it. I did the same basic browse of BPM Guitar within All Spectrasonics (the default), and got 100 results in a second. Fantastic matches - and there it was! Acousti-Chord Shimmer was in Trilian Creative. Also all my Nylon Sky patches showed up, some fantastic options in there of course.

Now arguably 100 is rather a lot, but that's fine cos I can just drill down using mood - Light got rid of all the power chords and now I have about 35 great results. ALL Spectrasonics own lovingly crafted patches from down the years that I have bought, paid for and cherish.

Now of course as an OmniTag user, I can search for ALL to give me even more choice. That gave me about 170 results, again I can drill down further by mood and immediately found some great options by The Unfinished.

I understand that the curated new categories get good meaningful results for most users, but it found me only 6% of all of Spectrasonics' own patches, many of which were far better fits for me than what I was offered in the new curated list. It's closer to 4% of the choices in all my libraries.

The irony is that Omnisphere 3 feels SMALLER to me in practice than Omnisphere 2. I realise that's kinda by design, but their curated lists just don't work for me in practice. It's not better and smaller, it's just smaller and more frustrating.

I wish there was a way to have 2 and 3 side by side, but it is strictly one or the other. I might switch it around and use the laptop for testing in 3, and restore my workhorse of Omni 2 for the main rig until the next version is released.

-

On this last point, I spent a little more time with Omni 3 exploring various search behaviours. I think there’s a bug - choosing AND in the logical operators doesn’t stick. First time I click (or shift-click) something it reverts back to OR.

But one bit of good news is that the search results are actually quite clever in terms of duplicate files. Some patches appear at least 7 times in different places, but you only see it once, I knew that much. But I put this to a further test. If I know where to look and how to navigate it, I can just about pick my way through View All. I know if I select ARP+BPM, I need to then switch Keyword in the results to Type and then suddenly all the Types from Omni 2 appear. The good news is it DOES show the legacy version of a patch in these search results. So in fact this is pretty much like my View All in Omni 2 – all the tags line up, and I get my 170 guitar arps (but not the 6 in the new section).

It's ugly and a bit fiddly to get there, and you do have to have a good memory of what the old categories were called, but it IS possible to access all those other patches in a useful way. So I think I’ll keep Omni 3 on my rig for now.