Spectrasonics has announced that Omnisphere, its hotly anticipated mega-synth, is now shipping with an MSRP of $499 US and €379 Euro.

Omnisphere is cross-platform, compatible with Apple Macintosh OS X 10.4 and higher as a native Universal Binary and also with Microsoft Windows XP/Vista. Audio Units, VST, and RTAS plug-in formats are supported for compatibility with all major host software.

Here’s their description:

This epic ‘Power Synth’ breaks completely new sonic ground by combining a wide variety of hybrid realtime synthesis techniques, an epic library of remarkable ‘Psychoacoustic’ sounds, and many innovative features that have never been seen before in any hardware or software synthesizer. The new instrument is the first to be based on Spectrasonics newly developed STEAM Engine.

“This is truly an Epic project,” said Eric Persing, Founder and Creative Director of Spectrasonics. “We have been working for many, many years; sampling unique sounds, experimenting, specifying the synthesis features and building the STEAM Engine to run it all. It’s been a very exciting process involving our team of software engineers, sound designers, musicians, and graphic artists from all over the world. We’ve been very deliberate in making it easy to use, and yet extremely powerful. Omnisphere is our new flagship synthesizer, and points the way to all our future virtual instruments. We are thrilled to offer a new product that will have a host of expansion capabilities in the future.”

Omnisphere offers a host of hybrid synthesis and new control capabilities including Variable Waveshaping DSP synthesis, Granular synthesis, Timbre Shifting, FM, polyphonic Ring Modulation, high-resolution streaming Sample Playback, Harmonia, Dual Multimode Filter structure, Chaos Envelopes, an advanced Unison mode, and the innovative Flex-Mod™ modulation routing system – to name a few.

The huge core library of Omnisphere is filled with years of creative sampling experiments and thousands of inspiring patches. Spectrasonics has pioneered several brand-new types of sampling for the core library of this instrument, including unique “Psychoacoustic” sounds and soundsources created with a new Composite Morphing Technique (CMT) – which morphs the harmonic characteristics of one instrument to another. As a bonus, a section of the core library is also devoted to representing the best of Spectrasonics award-winning sample libraries. When all of these organic core library soundsources are combined with the synthesis power of the STEAM engine, the sounds become “alive” in a truly dynamic and expressive way.

Among the many unique features this new multitimbral synth offers are its flexible arpeggiators with the innovative Groove Lock integration with Stylus RMX – allowing the arpeggiator’s pattern to instantly groove with the feel of the RMX drum loop; Live Mode for transitionless patch switching and layering, Stack Mode for powerful performance mapping; and integrated modulatable FX Racks.

Omnisphere is also the successor to Spectrasonics’ popular Atmosphere instrument, and contains enhanced versions of all the classic Atmosphere sounds. However, the brand new core library in Omnisphere is 10-times the size of Atmosphere and features thousands of completely new and different sounds.

There is an upgrade for all Atmosphere customers, available from Spectrasonics Techshop.