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