What is a Hardware Profile?

Omnisphere Hardware Profiles convert the supported hardware synths into hands-on controllers for Omnisphere. When a Hardware Profile is loaded, Omnisphere is instantly linked to that hardware synth. By translating MIDI messages from the hardware, it triggers sophisticated and carefully crafted interactions from a single touch of a knob, and Omnisphere automatically switches to the correct interface page. By touching a control on your synth, you can recall entire FX racks, assign multiple scaled parameters, and even create complex modulation matrix routings on-the-fly.

When designing Hardware Profiles, we make decisions that balance faithfulness to the hardware synth’s operation with creative use of its panel to make the most of Omnisphere’s power. For instance, the Moog Sub 37 has neither Unison nor effects, so we re-purposed controls on the Sub 37 panel to control Omnisphere’s Unison and FX send. The Korg Prologue only has one LFO, but when using it to control Omnisphere you have control over three LFOs. The Moog Voyager is a classic monophonic synth, but by using a control in its panel, you can switch between playing Omnisphere monophonically or polyphonically. You can even use the Voyager’s Touch Surface to control Omnisphere’s Orb for radical sound manipulations not possible in the Voyager.

This process required us to develop many features to adapt Omnisphere to operate like hardware synths. These range from adding a new Shared Signal Path, to creating new State Variable Filter types for use with the OB-6. We even added over 100 new Wavetables modeled after many of the supported hardware synths. Hardware Profiles not only allow you to control Omnisphere but permit Omnisphere to capture a surprising amount of the sonic character of the hardware.

Each hardware profile has a corresponding set of sounds in the Hardware Library which were specially designed using that hardware synth as an Omnisphere controller. The Hardware Library contains over 1,000 Patches, featuring a wide range of categories—many with a distinctly classic-analog flavor. These sounds are available for ALL users, regardless whether you use the hardware or not!