Omnisphere v2.6 Update Released

Spectrasonics just released the v2.6 update for Omnisphere.

Ooooh D-50 Fantasia sounds – I’m in love with the 80’s!

It has some cool new features:

  • The updated list of supported hardware now supports 65 hardware synths as controllers for Omnisphere – including the Roland D-50. This also means matching hardware sounds in Omnisphere for these synths. BTW – you don’t actually need any of these synths to access their hardware samples in Omnisphere – although it’s even cooler if you can. There’s 1,600 new patches in the Hardware Library.
  • The Arpeggiator has been greatly upgraded with some cool new features, plus you can drag and drop MIDI patterns.
  • The Synthesis engine has been upgraded, with more layers per patch, more filters, more LFOs, more wavetables, enhanced granular synthesis, and improved control over modulation routing.
  • Drag and drop your own samples onto the interface to add them. Much simpler.
  • More sounds – 14,000 so far.
  • More effects units. There’s now 57.
  • High-resolution graphics.
  • Live mode interface for touch screens
  • Enhanced Orb with attractor mode.

So – there’s plenty there to play with. I’ve already written a new (slightly-80’s) song within 24 hours of the update release just playing with some of the new patches.

If you already have Omnisphere 2, download this free update. If you don’t have Omnisphere 2 yet – it’s worth every penny just to have access to all those rare and expensive hardware synths.

Logic Pro X v10.4.3-10.4.4 feature highlights

These two Logic Pro X updates were definitely in the bug-fix category. There were numerous glitches that were fixed. See here for more details.

For those of you who had tried using Logic v10.4.2 with ARA2 and Celemony Melodyne v4.2.1, there were some serious issues that appeared around suddenly losing all your Melodyne edits when opening a project and “saving-as” without hitting Play first.

This mostly appears to be fixed but there’s still some problems that haven’t yet been completely sorted yet. There’s still some oddities with not being able to import tracks with Melodyne ARA plugins, plus not all the issues have been resolved with Track Alternatives and Melodyne ARA.

Actually, I notice there’s still some bus-routing problems with importing Track Stacks from other projects as well.

Apart from bug-fixes, there were no new features apart from a new MIDI port-based input filter in the MIDI Preferences.

MIDI input port filter preference pane – the “IAC Driver From Logic” should be disabled as an input.

Quite handy really, especially if you’re doing some tricky MIDI routing between audio apps or plugins using IAC (Inter-Application Communication) busses and the like. By default, Logic just accepts every MIDI input, so it’s very useful being able to turn off a bus that’s for sending data from Logic so it doesn’t create a MIDI feedback loop. Up until now, it meant some trickery with patching to fake objects in the MIDI Environment.

The MIDI window in Audio MIDI Setup.

Here’s hoping Apple fixes a few more of these niggles next time around.