JPF Home Page Forums Musician Gear and Techniques Recording Studio and Gear Forum OMS Patches / Names Applications?

First of all, OMS originally stood for "Opcode Music System", Opcode later turned the name into "Open Music System" and made it public domain. Opcode is now out of business, so it's a good thing they did this at that time. However, OMS is being phased out and will soon become totally useless when OS X is the standard.

2nd - OMS only works on Macs running OS8 or OS9 (not OSX or PCs). Apple's "Core Midi" for OS X is going to provide a similar service over time. In fact, the original developer from Opcode who wrote OMS now works for Apple and was heavily involved in developing Core Midi.

3rd - OMS is simply a way to more easily select existing patches from your software (like Protools or Logic Audio). It doesn't provide you with new sounds. Instead of selecting "Patch #122" on your software to get the synth to change to that patch, it simply uses a file containing all the NAMES of the patches so you can select "Grunge Bass" instead of "Patch #122". The files they are trading back and forth on various OMS sites are simply the "name" files for synths and workstations that are newer than when OMS became public domain. There were a hundred or so synth patch name files that came with OMS, but later synths weren't included. Some nice people have made name files for their own synths and then made them available to others as well.

So, I don't think OMS does what you thought it does.

As far as outgrowing your existing patches, that does happen. The first thing you should do is sit down with your Korg manual and learn a little about how to program your own sounds. With very little study, you can at least learn how to modify your Korg sounds so that they aren't the common ones that everyone else uses and have your own stamp of creativity on them.

There are also places in the backs of the recording/keyboard magazines that sell new patchs for existing synths if you don't want to learn how to program your own. They range in price from $25 to maybe $75 for a few banks (up to even 1000 patches).

Another option would be to use what they call a "Universal Librarian" such as Emagic's Soundiver product which will "poll" your synth and store the existing patches and then allow you to randomize certain elements or make new patches from your computer. Then it can send them to your synth. You can check Emagic's site for product details.

One more thing, MOTU makes a system called "Freemidi", in case you've ever heard of it, which does pretty much all of what OMS does and works hand-in-hand with it, so if you use MOTU's Digital Performer you can choose to use either OMS or FreeMidi and get pretty much the same functionality.

Hope that helps!


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Larry
www.audibleresponse.com


[This message has been edited by Lwilliam (edited 03-29-2003).]