An Omnisphere alternative for synth pads and textures

What Omnisphere 3 costs

Spectrasonics sells Omnisphere 3 for $499. Its standard upgrade is $199, and the upgrade from Atmosphere is $249.

What Omnisphere has that Studio 56 doesn’t

Omnisphere 3 comes with a very large library. Spectrasonics lists 18 new libraries of sounds in version 3, beside the remastered patches of earlier versions. Its sounds come from synthesis and from what it calls deep-sampled soundsources. Studio 56 has no library like that.

What Studio 56 does instead

Studio 56 builds synth sounds and has no recorded sounds behind it. You describe the sound you want in Studio 56 in your browser and the AI builds it there. You might ask for “a wide pad that slowly opens up over each chord” or “a glassy bell pluck with a short delay.” You can also build one by hand. Either way you can play it in your browser the moment it’s made and change any part of it.

When it sounds right, send it to your DAW. Every sound you make plays inside the Studio 56 plugin, a VST3 and AU, so there’s nothing new to install for each one. It works in Ableton Live, Logic Pro, GarageBand, FL Studio and most other DAWs except Pro Tools.

Sounds it does best

Basses, leads, pads, plucks, keys and bells come out best, along with organ and string-machine textures, and the synth guide shows what to ask for. Pads, keys, bells and slow textures are where it can stand in for a synth library, and sounds built on recordings are where it can’t.

When Omnisphere is still the one to get

• You want thousands of finished sounds to browse instead of building your own.
• You want sounds that are built on recordings.
• You make music in Pro Tools. Omnisphere 3 runs in AAX hosts, and Studio 56 doesn’t.
• You want to shape sounds from a hardware synth or controller. Omnisphere’s Hardware Integration comes with more than 300 hardware profiles.
• You already have songs or patches made in Omnisphere.

How to try it

Open Studio 56 in your browser and describe a sound, or build one by hand. To play it in your DAW you need a Mac or Windows computer and a DAW such as Ableton Live, Logic Pro, GarageBand or FL Studio. Download Studio 56, add it to an instrument track and sign in, then send the sound from your browser. The guides for FL Studio, Ableton Live and Logic Pro have the exact clicks.

What is free and what Pro adds

Building a sound by hand is free with no limit, and your first 3 asks to the AI are free. Your first 3 sends to your DAW are free, and Pro sends as many as you want. Pro is $10 a month, and the AI builds about 70 sounds a month on it.