Roland Cloud

[fmr]

I find Roland now focused enough on recreating their old machines. Maybe time now to add something fresh and new?

And when was the last time Roland created something "fresh and new"?

I'd rather see them recreate what they did best in the past.

[Hanz Meyzer]

Well, I wish Korg or Roland once came up with a really state-of-the-art-and-tech workstation softsynth, like Korg Kronos VSTI, or Roland V-Synth 2 VSTi. Or at least making a VSTi of some more recent abandoned legacy products, like Korg M3, V-Synth, Radias. It could cost more than usual then.

[Bippo]

The 90's were nice...but we are in 2019, they already included the jv-1080 and d-50, why not expecting for something more modern such as integra/fantom? All these old romplers have their nostlagic value but I think they should have higher priority of including their most recent romplers instead of feeding the masses with old techonlogy in the form of vst.

Unless you aim for a retro sound, I doubt there's any advantage of using these old sounds compared to the high sample rate of kontakt libraries or spectrasonics products, for instance.

You are funny. Didn't you realize yet that Roland Cloud is ALL about recreations in software of OLD machines?


WRONG!
Roland Cloud is NOT all about recreations in software of old machines.
Only the "legendary" and "anthology" sections of their catalog (plus 808/909/303) is dedicated to that. What about sections such as "flavr", "tera" and products such as "drum studio"?
You better know what you pay your rent for buddy.

Man, you reveal more and more that you know nothing about what you are talking about. "flavr", "tera" and products such as "drum studio", are nothing more than sample libraries. Even "Anthology" is a mere collection of sample libraries. They are not instrument "emulations" of anything. Actually, "anthology", "flavr" and "drum studio" run inside Concerto, which is the Sample Player, and and a rather simple one. Don't know about Tera, since I have much better pianos than anything Roland can come up with.

Do you know any hardware manufacturer that offers SIMULTAENOUSLY software versions of their hardware instruments currently on the market?

That's exactly my point. They fear of declining hardware sales, which is why they milk your money for 30 years old instruments. That's why there are way better products out there in the realm of vi's than these in the roland's cloud.

And that's OK. If I was interested in something like Integra or Fantom, I have HALion, Falcon, Kontakt, Omnisphere, etc. Lots of alternatives. But if you think there are "way better products out there in the realm of vi's than these in the roland's cloud", then what's your point being around here? Why would you want these to be for sale? Buy the "way better ones".

Besides, the Integra and the Fantom are nothing more than variations of the JV-1080 (which actually goes way beyond the 1080, up to the XV-5080). We around here aim for the JD-800/JD-990 because they had something that you CAN'T find in those "modern" Roland machines (the same way the Jupiter had, and the Juno, and the x0x machines, etc.)

WRONG AGAIN!
Integra-7 has all of the sounds from the XV-5080 + all 12 srx libraries + the SuperNATURAL sounds that you won't find in xv-5080.

So, I am missing the "SuperNATURAL". It's still samples. As I said, I have plenty of great sample players available in software that play samples with a higher degree a realism than anything "SuperNATURAL" Roland can come up with. You should know that "SuperNATURAL" is nothing more than a fancy marketing slogan.

And, if we are going for more modern machines, Roland has one that easily overpasses those Fantoms and Integra - the V-Synth. I, as well as some others, also hope to see that one - way more than any Fantom, I dare to say.

You seem to know little about the subject.

WRONG AGAIN!
I wouldn't expect to see the v-synth as a vst for the reasons I stated above.

YOU ARE THE ONE WRONG (here as in anything before). Actually, since the V-Synth isn't in production anymore, and for several years already, it is a perfect candidate for an emulation. I don't say it will be done, I say there's no reason it shouldn't, because it will not hurt hardware sales, since there is no hardware counterpart.

Man, I read your comment and I'm like.... wtf

Where did I say that flavr, tera etc are emulations of anything? You said thay the roland cloud is ALL about recreation of their old machines and I've used those products to contradict that wrong statement of yours.

Then you go on by saying "well don't use their cloud plugins or integra, just use halion/kontakt etc..." Guess what? That's exactly what I'm doing, and I still have the right to criticize their cloud service as someone who tried it but was disappointed. You just keep replying with these pointless replies, and I keep on laughing

[gentleclockdivider]

[/quote]
So, I am missing the "SuperNATURAL". It's still samples. As I said, I have plenty of great sample players available in software that play samples with a higher degree a realism than anything "SuperNATURAL" Roland can come up with. You should know that "SuperNATURAL" is nothing more than a fancy marketing slogan.
[/quote]

Don't forget the supernatural filters , not found in any cloud instrument
And they sound pretty good

[Aloysius]

I had GAS last night and watned to purchase Roland Sound Canvas VA. I like the cheesy sounds and it doesn't seem to be 'on the cloud'. However, during checkout I was directed to PayPal. There was no possibility of paying for the product without setting up a PayPal Account. Are there any third party sellers of this VSTi? Thanks.

I know it's a little off topic but it's also a little more on topic than some of the posts here.

[Aerio]

Regarding "Fresh and new":
XV5080 Editor 2002 vs JV1080 Cloud 2018:

xv5080 editor 2002.jpg

jv1080-cloud 2018.jpg

[dionenoid]

After 2 months of Roland Cloud i decided to quit it. I would have quit earlier if it wasn't for some sounds used in tracks i had to finish. Here's my experience, rant start :

For me there's only 3 interesting plug-ins in the whole package after some time : System-8, TR-909 and TR-808. But they're not interesting enough to be paying 20 euro's each month. I can do without them, especially with the whole activation thing : each week i have to get online and activate ALL instances used in my projects.
And in the meanwhile i pray that the Roland Cloud service is not down at that time. Which happened 2 times in the last 2 months, took me over an hour to be able to proceed.
The Roland Cloud pages are usually slow, if you have a Cloud based service at least make sure the Cloud is working properly. Here in Holland we have pretty fast internet everywhere, but uploading a 2gb file to WeTransfer actually took less time than activating 1 plug-in on Roland Cloud.
The update and installation process is stupid : it always installs unnecessary versions (like AAX in my case) which i have to manually delete with each update if i want to keep my hd clean. The option is there in Cloud Manager but always greyed out. Most times there's also no info about what's improved or updated anyway.

Then the plug-ins themselves : somehow i feel i'm working with stuff that's been programmed 15 years ago. Each plug-in has their own short-comings ; lacking functions, different old-fashioned preset browsers, different fx set-ups which are mostly fiddly to use, functionality that's hidden behind really small knobs etc.
I really don't understand why they just don't sell individual pieces of software anyway, think some people would love to pay for some of them. They're missing out on a lot of potential customers.

I have no complaints about the sound tho. Sure the emulations could be better in lots of cases, most of them sound too clean imo, but overall i'm not dissapointed. What however bothers me is that they didn't do more with it. Why not put extra functions on their emulations, after all it's 2019. And why not have more consistent functionality in the whole line ?

And then the cpu useage like some people already commented on. Why does the 909 always use maximum cpu when i only use a clap for example ? I use individual (instrument) tracks for everything, like a lot of people do. If i would make a track with some 808 and 909 sounds my cpu is being killed. Some JV-1080 type strings with longer release times brought my cpu to his knees, and that's even just sample-based. Just plain stupid, they really need to address that.

So, rant over for now. There's lots more to complain about but it's already a long post I think Roland has a lot more work to do to make this a useful package, because right now it's really not worth it.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I have no complaints about the sound tho. Sure the emulations could be better in lots of cases, most of them sound too clean imo, but overall i'm not dissapointed. What however bothers me is that they didn't do more with it. Why not put extra functions on their emulations, after all it's 2019. And why not have more consistent functionality in the whole line ?

I think you bring up some good points, but I do think you're overlooking some things in the one above about not adding new features. For instance, they've added effects to just about every synth, so that's a new feature. And it's basically the same set of effects across the line (for better or worse), except for the Juno chorus which you can only get in the Juno-106. They've added visual pattern sequencers to the 808, 909, and 303, with MIDI or Audio export. Many synths got added voices (Juno-106 and JX3P were originally 6 voice synths, believe they're at least 8 voices in the Cloud). I believe they reuse the arpeggiator across the line of synths, which is an addition to some synths, or at least an expansion of the original arpeggiator functionality. The System-8 itself has had a bunch of oscillator waveforms and filters added to it since it's originaly release, and while these were added to the hardware too, it's still a welcome addition and expansion of the feature set. So, they didn't go all out and really expand the feature set for the classic synths wildly, but they did a few things here and there to make improvements where it made sense without straying too far from the orignals. I much prefer working with the Roland drum machines for example, compared to the D16 versions, just because Roland made a few little tweaks to the pattern editor whereas D16 was too true to the oirignal.

[sleepcircle]

TR-909 and TR-808

you could buy the DrumMachine by AudioRealism. It's a pretty decent emulation of the 606, the 808 and the 909. very clean, again, but most of the 'unclean' nature of the originals came from the fact that they were routed through so much stuff to make them part of a finished track. the rest you could probably makeup by putting it through a pre-amp

[Aerio]

somehow i feel i'm working with stuff that's been programmed 15 years ago.

…mostly it is. Everybody who wonders why the cloud JV-1080 looks and feels like stuff from the pre-VST era: just see my post above.

For the sake of convenience Roland simply reuses the graphics from their 1990s editors, while the old engine code runs on a realtime emulation framework (which explains the CPU overheads).

[dionenoid]

I have no complaints about the sound tho. Sure the emulations could be better in lots of cases, most of them sound too clean imo, but overall i'm not dissapointed. What however bothers me is that they didn't do more with it. Why not put extra functions on their emulations, after all it's 2019. And why not have more consistent functionality in the whole line ?

I think you bring up some good points, but I do think you're overlooking some things in the one above about not adding new features. For instance, they've added effects to just about every synth, so that's a new feature. And it's basically the same set of effects across the line (for better or worse), except for the Juno chorus which you can only get in the Juno-106. They've added visual pattern sequencers to the 808, 909, and 303, with MIDI or Audio export. Many synths got added voices (Juno-106 and JX3P were originally 6 voice synths, believe they're at least 8 voices in the Cloud). I believe they reuse the arpeggiator across the line of synths, which is an addition to some synths, or at least an expansion of the original arpeggiator functionality. The System-8 itself has had a bunch of oscillator waveforms and filters added to it since it's originaly release, and while these were added to the hardware too, it's still a welcome addition and expansion of the feature set. So, they didn't go all out and really expand the feature set for the classic synths wildly, but they did a few things here and there to make improvements where it made sense without straying too far from the orignals. I much prefer working with the Roland drum machines for example, compared to the D16 versions, just because Roland made a few little tweaks to the pattern editor whereas D16 was too true to the oirignal.

The fx on all the synths are another annoyance ; on some you can choose either Chorus, Chorus2 or Phaser, on others you have to choose between distortion or something else. They don't have the option to use Distortion after the Chorus in many cases. And it's different on each synth. That's what i also meant with no consistency between all of them. Since they already programmed all these fx (and also for Concerto etc.) why not make them available on all their synths ?

System-8 is the only synth i liked. It's like an expanded Jupiter/JP8000 hybrid or something. It shows that they are able to come up with something original based on the old stuff. It could have way more presets and a more modern preset browser tho, as well as the beforementioned fx.

Btw : The new 303 is a good example of how far behind Roland really is. Just have a look at ABL3 :
https://www.audiorealism.se/audiorealis ... ine-3.html#
It's the go-to for many 303-lovers for many, many years now...

[chk071]

Btw : The new 303 is a good example of how far behind Roland really is. Just have a look at ABL3 :
https://www.audiorealism.se/audiorealis ... ine-3.html#
It's the go-to for many 303-lovers for many, many years now...

How is the date of release an indicator of how far behind someone is? What matters is how good of a emulation the Roland 303 is, and it sounds pretty darn good judging by the sound demos.

[dionenoid]

TR-909 and TR-808

you could buy the DrumMachine by AudioRealism. It's a pretty decent emulation of the 606, the 808 and the 909. very clean, again, but most of the 'unclean' nature of the originals came from the fact that they were routed through so much stuff to make them part of a finished track. the rest you could probably makeup by putting it through a pre-amp

I have pretty much all the emulations. Wave Alchemy Revolution is the one to beat imo. Or Goldbaby's SuperAnalogue 808 and 909. And i still have a real 909
The "unclean" nature of the 808 is also part of the machine itself (i've had the real thing for many years). It's something that most emulations do wrong. But that doesn't mean they're not useable, on the contrary, i preferred that in many cases, that's why i sold the hardware (plus i made a nice profit on it).

But thanx

[sleepcircle]

oh, hey, thank YOU. i haven't actually bought audiorealism yet, maybe i should go for wave alchemy's version instead.

[mrj1nx]

somehow i feel i'm working with stuff that's been programmed 15 years ago.

…mostly it is. Everybody who wonders why the cloud JV-1080 looks and feels like stuff from the pre-VST era: just see my post above.

For the sake of convenience Roland simply reuses the graphics from their 1990s editors, while the old engine code runs on a realtime emulation framework (which explains the CPU overheads).

Interesting, I suspected something like that. Strange that they also made it look like Im on windows 95. Like you said its 2019... but they certainly nailed that 'vintage' feel... Even stranger is that they managed to make the System 8 plugin feel equally dated. I think dionenoid summed up everything I was thinking while trying it out the other day. Well spoken. Still + points to Roland for delving into plugins! Keep it up and improve them and I bet its gonna be real good id also prefer if they where available as singles. I like to keep my collection small and focused. (Relatively speaking)