I've been playing around with Omni 3 for a couple of days now.
PROS
INSTALLATION
Download and install were a breeze. Everything worked first time
SONICS
The sonics have drawn near universal praise, and it's easy to see why. Both the new filters and the new effects have got gentle saturation nailed. There's so many ways to just give that bit of character, warmth and dirt. There's also new analog pitch drift which adds a subtle chorus effect if pushed too far and fully detuned if pushed even further, but at moderate levels again adds to the character.
There's around 4,600 new unique patches of every type and variety, and many of these are weep-inducingly gorgeous (and some of course are just weep-inducing at the aggressive EDM end of things). There seemed a lot more organic-sounding drums than I remember - while they do seem to have forgotten about rhythm in terms of a Stylus replacement, there's now a lot of cinematic / world stuff that has snuck in here.
NEW FX AND PLUGIN
35 new effects which can now be hosted in a brand new effects plugin (up to 4 per instance). There's a large range of classic emulations (LA-2A, API, Neve and Paultec EQs plus some more interesting creative choices. Inversions is a reverb that can do delays and reverse effects; Solar Shimmer is a beautiful shimmer verb, Refraction is a blooming delay and there's some gorgeous saturations and distortions. A small gripe on the Swiss Army Delay - you have to switch to the hidden Page 2 to change the mode which is absolutely fundamental on how it works (on the front page there's no way to unlink L and R for example - and for Swiss Army operations that's a problem).
Then yes, you can load all these racks into a separate fx plugin for use on absolutely everything. For some, worth the upgrade price alone.
GLOBAL CONTROLS / CONTROLLER INTEGRATION
This works surprisingly well. Every patch - including user, third party and legacy - now has global controls available on the main page. ADSR, filter, vibrato, unison, tone, ambience and limiter. This might feel so-whatish at first, but it's doing a lot of under-the-hood magic. The ambience is a macro for ANY reverb in the system, and also mic positions where available, all reduced to amount and length controls.
But the fun part is that most controllers can get hard-wired to these new controls. I have a Novation Launchkey 88 mk3 with 8 knobs and 8 sliders. So if there's a patch across 4 layers and I need to increase the attack, I just dive for that slider and it works every time (in theory). In practice it's a bit sticky, you often have to retrigger a note to wake it up, but it's a good workflow boost.
Pro tip - on the face of it there is no direct way to launch with your controller already engaged, but there is a trick for it - load it up and then save as Default Multi.
MUTATE
We've have Sound Match for years as a way to start from one patch and find others which are the same but different. The Orb adds fun variations of the parameters without doing any of the hard work, a roll of the dice and diving in is all it takes. Now there's a new kid in town, Mutate. This swaps out the sound sources for similar ones but keeps everything else the same. You can mutate mutations - if the patch is a simple one layer one, it starts to add more layers. You can also engage extreme mode where the variations are wilder.
It's a fun and effortless way to shake it up, and whatever you create here is unique to you. It's a bit unrefined in v1 - every mutation is automatically saved and named, and there's no way to delete / tidy without going into the OS and deleting them in Finder / Explorer. Also the ability to lock layers would be handy.
CONS
THE BROWSER
You knew I was gonna say this, right?
First a plus - the side browser is improved, you don't need the full browser so often now. You can now search by keyword, mood and, er, author right there, and sound match is available.
That, sadly, is the last goof thing I can say about the browser. The full screen one is nothing short of abysmal.
First, take a look at what they've done to the search box:
This is mind-blowing in its incompetence. It's hard to envisage a worse use of screen real estate. It's like a parody of bad user design. As a result, you can either have the tags or the search - but not both. Yet it is active if anything is in the search box - just invisible. So you keep getting hardly any search results and cannot see why. It's a recipe for rage.
All they'd need to do to create space for the box where it used to be in the header is REMOVE THE TAB FOR SEARCH BOX.
Gobsmacking.
Then there's the other problem - they've thrown out their old tagging system and replaced it with a new one. Which means, alongside their other products, you have two completely different standards. This is why they more or less force you to only search one location at a time - not so much OMNIsphere as UNIsphere. The default mode in Omni 2 of searching All Spectrasonics has gone completely because it would now look so bad. The only global search option left is View All, which is a dogs breakfast of similar but different terms:
Hits and Bits or Hits + Bits? Bells and Vibes or Bell Tones?
The exact same 27,000 patches (without the 4,600 new Omni 3 ones) in Omni 2 looked like this:
Much easier on the eye too, isn't it? This is not a good update for those with visual impairment of any kind.
Eagle eyed members might spot that Omni 3 has somehow hallucinated entire empty deprecated categories like ARP + Rhythm. Click on these and it stares blankly at you for a few seconds before jumping back to ALL.
Compared to Omni 2, this is a hellscape. I do have a suggestion for how to make this brave new world actually work - Custom Views, where users can select their own groups of directories. This simple feature would actually be very powerful - you could search all the classic synths in the main browser in a single hit if you didn't care about analog / vs digital or old vs new - search 3 in 1. You could put together all the non-Omni 3 Spectrasonics products - Moog, Sonic Extensions, Trilian and Keyscape. You could make a little list of all The Unfinished libraries. And you could even have Omni 2 Mode - using the legacy versions of the original patches it should be possible to make it behave in the exact same way.
VI Control thread on that here -
https://vi-control.net/community/thread ... er.167319/
CONCLUSION
There is so much to like in Omni 3, and if you roll your own or want a simple, self-contained quick way to search their patches in simple lists then BUY NOW. But if you are a heavy browser user - especially if you have a lot of other Spectrasonics / third party products - I'm not entirely sure it is worth the colossal hit to the workflow right now. Here's hoping 3.1 makes things more manageable.
