Omnisphere in Cantabile

Cantabile
1

Is anyone using Omnisphere here? If so, I’m interested to hear how you’re using it with Cantabile. In particular,

  • Do you select patches in songs and states using whole bank or preset select?
  • Do you use Omnisphere multitimbrally, or just one patch at a time?
  • Do you use your own patches? If so, how do you prefer to store and select them?
  • Do you run multiple instances? If so, how do you prefer to share patches across instances?

Neil

2

I am also interested in the responses to this. I do use Omnisphere with Cantabile, but I am probably not using it in a very efficient way. Here’s my typical approach:

  • Create a new rack to contain this new “sound”.
  • Go into the Omnisphere plugin (from Cantabile), either select an existing patch or create a new one, edit as needed, add additional patches onto other Parts (up to 8 in the Multi) as needed, and finally save the Multi.
  • Go back to Cantabile and save the Rack, and use it within a song.

I don’t use the plugin’s abilities for keyboard splits and mappings; I prefer to have all of that in Cantabile. And if I need Omnisphere in another Rack (regardless of whether it’s in the same Song or SetList, or not), I use a new instance of Omnispere.

Despite Brad’s excellent reply to another post, I am often unsure what exactly gets saved when I saved the Rack, and understand that it is different for each plugin. For that reason, I don’t try to use presets, pseudo-presets, or banks; because I don’t understand how they work with Omnisphere well enough to trust the process during a live show. But since Omnisphere uses significant computer resources, I would be interested in hearing from people who do.

3

I actually went through all my plugins and tested to see how well they worked using Cantabile’s preset / pseudo-preset drop-down, and whether they required “Whole bank” state behaviour for changes. As it turned out, I think just about all my plugins worked fine with presets / pseudo-presets, and in fact many (eg Diva, ImpOscar2, VB3) continued sounding held notes after the patch change, rather than muting. The Native Instruments ones all required “Whole bank”, as far as I could see.

The reason I posted about Omnisphere was that it appeared to work fine with presets (pseudo-presets, actually, I believe), but I’ve recently seen that this doesn’t appear to be reliable (I posted about it here).

The problem with Omnisphere is that patches typically take a few seconds to load, so it’s not generally practical to switch patches mid-song. So I’ve been wondering whether to go for multiple Omnisphere instances running single patches, or fewer Omnisphere instances running multis, where I can switch sound by just switching MIDI channel. One concern though is incurring sample load time between songs, and losing the benefit from sharing Omnisphere instances across songs.

Roland, it’s interesting to hear your “One Omnisphere rack per song” approach - I may consider that myself to simplify my setup. I’m currently running about half a dozen Omnisphere racks, each running a single patch, which I re-use across songs.

Neil