20/11/2025
Progress Update: Omnisphere 3…. Serious Doubts…
So I have managed to spend a few weeks, update all my scripting, adapted everything to work with the new library formats and tagging and improved all the tag masking to convert all the Category, Type, Mood, Keyword, Group tags to NKS compatible tags, a massive undertaking but the process is now all working and can run without intervention.
However….
After some initial tests have all proved successful I have crunched some numbers and realised a rather serious issue here.
Omnisphere exports preset data in a very inefficient text format which for Omnisphere 3 with all the new features and 4 layers of controls, is 376kb per NKS file. To export all tagging and also add some extra tags to the files so I can manipulate the tagging of banks, each preset takes about 40 seconds to generate.
Omnisphere 3 comes with 41,000 presets
So if we were to just calculate 1 machine running 24/7 to export these presets would be 40 seconds x 41,000 / 60 minutes / 24hrs in a day = 1138 Days or 3 years to process.
Then if we look at the 376kb per file x 41,000 files / 1024 per MB / 1024 per GB = 14.7GB without previews, likely double that with previews so a total of 30GB of space would be needed just for the NKS files
So, this is now a serious problem I have to figure out if it is both worth the time and if anyone will want approx 15GB of NKS files on ther system. I can likely get the time it takes each preset down to about 10 seconds because at the moment in testing I am writing every extra tag into temporary tags so I can check the accuracy of NKS tagging so I won't need to write Mood, Timbre, Keywords, Group etc as these are all converted to NKS character and "Type 2" tagging but I still need things like Version written to a temp tag.
Just starting to dawn how big this library actually is and it may require splitting it up but I first have to really calculate the time it will take, I haven't even started on designing a new template yet….