Korg OASYS

“Three thousand owners, one open Linux heart, and a promise that software can dream in hardware.”

The Korg OASYS was a workstation synthesizer released in early 2005, a year after the beloved Triton Extreme, and it played by different rules. Instead of a fixed sound set, it ran a custom Linux operating system designed to be arbitrarily expandable through software updates, limited only by its PC-like hardware. It was the software realization of a research project that had earlier produced the OASYS PCI DSP card, c

The dream had already survived one setback — the original OASYS keyboard concept was scrapped due to excessive production costs and the limits of then-current technology. When production was officially discontinued in April 2009, Korg had sold just over 3000 units worldwide, and the final software update arrived on November 24, 2009. In 2011 the idea lived on as the Korg Kronos, introduced at that year's NAMM Show —

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