Spectrasonics Omnisphere – imagination land for your DAW.

With thousands of plugins at the tips of any music producers fingers it sometimes seems overwhelming in finding and choosing the one plugin that is “it”. Modern DAW (digital audio workstation) plugins have come a long way offering incredible high definition sound, tons of presets, and enough flexibility to help create literally anything in your imagination. The downside is of course, time. I myself have spent hours and days just listening and experimenting with preset libraries in some of the more common plugins using my DAW of choice – Logic Studio. One thing is for sure – musicians of all types and from all backgrounds have at least one unifying commonality – the pressure to produce something wonderful without taking forever to do it. Some may argue that an expansive audio unit takes time to master and build a routine with – I agree, but who has forever to do it? This problem ceased to exist when I discovered Spectrasonics Omnisphere. A beautiful plugin for both Mac and PC, that is nothing short of amazing. With a built in library just shy of 50GB (yes thats gigabytes!) your initial reaction might be one of hesitation at such a monster sized plugin. Let me reassure you – it is worth every byte. I produce in the genre of ambient soundscapes, so I have been searching for that one plugin that can do it all – Omnisphere is it. It offers amazing capability and the sound quality is at the very highest level.

“After many years of development, Spectrasonics is proud to release the brand new flagship virtual instrument Omnisphere. This epic ‘Power Synth’ breaks completely new sonic ground by combining a wide variety of hybrid realtime synthesis techniques, an epic library of remarkable ‘Psychoacoustic’ sounds, and many innovative features that have never been seen before in any hardware or software synthesizer. The new instrument is the first to be based on Spectrasonics newly developed STEAM Engine.”

You will need a powerful computer to run this software as it is designed. My own setup is 21.5″ iMac 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo 8GB DDR3 RAM 500GB internal HDD with the library streaming from an external 1.5TB HDD. Ram is the key for this software. You can run it ok with 4GB but will be limited to running simultaneous patches (Omnisphere lets you run 8 channels with 2 patches per channel simultaneous). To really allow the software to come alive I suggest 8GB of RAM and have an external hard drive with the library stored on it as well – this will allow you to use the streaming technology built in without bogging your OS hard drive down. These are hefty requirements but this is a professional instrument and it is all worth it in the end.