PG-8X (2.0) released

[EvilDragon]

oops

[EvilDragon]

¸I've got all 3, have owned a System-8 for years and have a ton of experience with ACB Jupiter. I place the Roland at the bottom of the list. By far. TAL is an amazing synth - sounds great pretty much all the time - huge sweet spot - great filters - can be punchy and big, the Arturia is nice, Diva's Jupiter is great too (in it's "Diva not being a full 1:1 emulation like Repro is" kind of way), and finally the Roland sounds lifeless, flat, and has weak filters.

That's all fine, but have you played an actual JP-8 against it in a shootout? I have, on a few occasions. Roland's is more accurate than Arturia's. The GUI is horrid, tho.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I refuse to believe a Jupiter-8 sounds as bad as that Roland plug-out and choose to believe that it must sound as good as TAL J-8.

I honestly never even shot out the Arturia against either of those but thought the new one sounded decent.

[D-Fusion]

I refuse to believe a Jupiter-8 sounds as bad as that Roland plug-out and choose to believe that it must sound as good as TAL J-8.

I honestly never even shot out the Arturia against either of those but thought the new one sounded decent.

Roland Jupiter 8 is just a overhyped standard Subtractive synth and there is nothing Fat sounding or Magic about it.

So i guess you wouldn't like the Original Jupiter either if you get to lay your hands on it.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

So i guess you wouldn't like the Original Jupiter either if you get to lay your hands on it.

Totally possible. Or maybe the only Jupiter-8 I'd like is Patrick's [from TAL]!

When I'm controlling TAL's J-8 from my System-8 hardware, it sounds awesome. It's so easy to dial in great sounding patches from scratch. Everything sounds good to me. Then when I try to dial in patches on the Jupiter-8 plug-out, ugh...sounds like ass. Always a chore to get a good sound of that thing. If the Jupiter-8 plugout sounded like TAL's J-8, I'd be as effusive in my praise.

I don't think the test of a synth is how much you can make it sound like another synth playing brass or keys patches. I think it's how good it sounds when you're using it and programming it. Synths are more than the sum of their parts to me. How do the filters react to the envelopes, what are the envelope shapes and timing and how are they scaled on the interface (physical or virtual), how do the VCF's and VCA's react to signals at various levels, how are the voice offsets modeled if at all, etc.? That's where the term "having a wide sweet spot" comes into play. I feel like TAL's J-8 has one. Roland's is very narrow.

And I much prefer the Softube Model 84 to either the Roland Juno-60 or 106 plug-outs - and I think those are far superior sounding than the Jupiter-8. The Roland mono synths sound pretty great to me though. The Pro-Mars filter will shred my speakers if I'm not careful. In a good way!

I just don't think Roland's ACB is anything special. It's just marketing buzzword for the same sh*t everyone else basically does when they claim to do "component modeling" but that very few companies really do well (U-he, Synapse, TAL, some others in the FX domain in particular).

This is a hill I'm willing to die on.

[EvilDragon]

They definitely are doing zero delay feedback and all that stuff in ACB. It is a buzzword, but they ARE lifting some serious DSP muscle in there. And yes, it is component modeling for sure, they do use SPICE and all that.

I'm having zero issues getting great sounding patches from either RC JP8 or J-8... like no effort really. Both are great.

There's this one thing in J-8 that definitely doesn't happen on a real JP-8 (at least not the one I played), and that's you can get both oscillators to sound dead locked in pitch, like DCOs. That breaks the immersion quite a bit from an otherwise excellent synth. We've discussed this already in the J-8 thread. I still think something weird is going on there, no way TAL's hardware unit can get that much in phase without it ever drifting, yet he did it in the plugin anyways. Oh well.

On RC JP-8 you can't get oscillators dead locked in pitch like DCOs. There's always some phase noise. As it should be.

[D-Fusion]

So i guess you wouldn't like the Original Jupiter either if you get to lay your hands on it.

Totally possible. Or maybe the only Jupiter-8 I'd like is Patrick's [from TAL]!

When I'm controlling TAL's J-8 from my System-8 hardware, it sounds awesome. It's so easy to dial in great sounding patches from scratch. Everything sounds good to me. Then when I try to dial in patches on the Jupiter-8 plug-out, ugh...sounds like ass. Always a chore to get a good sound of that thing. If the Jupiter-8 plugout sounded like TAL's J-8, I'd be as effusive in my praise.

I don't think the test of a synth is how much you can make it sound like another synth playing brass or keys patches. I think it's how good it sounds when you're using it and programming it. Synths are more than the sum of their parts to me. How do the filters react to the envelopes, what are the envelope shapes and timing and how are they scaled on the interface (physical or virtual), how do the VCF's and VCA's react to signals at various levels, how are the voice offsets modeled if at all, etc.? That's where the term "having a wide sweet spot" comes into play. I feel like TAL's J-8 has one. Roland's is very narrow.

And I much prefer the Softube Model 84 to either the Roland Juno-60 or 106 plug-outs - and I think those are far superior sounding than the Jupiter-8. The Roland mono synths sound pretty great to me though. The Pro-Mars filter will shred my speakers if I'm not careful.

I just don't think Roland's ACB is anything special. It's just marketing buzzword for the same sh*t everyone else basically does when they claim to do "component modeling" but that very few companies really do well (U-he, Synapse, TAL, some others in the FX domain in particular).

This is a hill I'm willing to die on.

I too like the Tal version because you can do so much extra stuff to change the sound and it uses less cpu than the RC Version and you can use the up and down arrow to browse presets (I own the license for all 3. Arturia, Tal And RC).

The Tal one is very close to the RC Version in Oscillator tone when you set the Oscillator Calibration to around 3.02-3.04 and it can mimick lots of different Oscillator tones from different Roland synths with that knob.

All 3 of them are great and gives you some different flavors of the same synth.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

There's this one thing in J-8 that definitely doesn't happen on a real JP-8 (at least not the one I played), and that's you can get both oscillators to sound dead locked in pitch, like DCOs. That breaks the immersion quite a bit from an otherwise excellent synth. We've discussed this already in the J-8 thread. I still think something weird is going on there, no way TAL's hardware unit can get that much in phase without it ever drifting, yet he did it in the plugin anyways. Oh well.

Yeah, I was unhappy about that to on initial release but then we collectively badgered him about it and he added the SC panel with the voice offsets. I just have a single setting I like, and keep it there via the SC Lock feature. So in that case, it's a non-issue.

Anyway, we've veered way off topic (my bad), but I do hope PG-8X continues on in some form going forward and maybe gets a Mac M1 port!

[gentleclockdivider]

Roland ACB sounds great , their latest boutiques are sadly enough zencore based and thus inferior sounding .

[Mutant]

Guys.
PG-8X

[jamcat]

Clearly PG-8X is abandonware, or, at the very least won't be updated for MacOS/M1 in the foreseeable future. At this point the best we can hope for realistically is that Arturia does the JX-8P in V-Collection 9.It's time to cut bait.

This right here is why I will no longer patronize small developers.

[Halonmusic]

it is not abandonwar. EvilDragon mentioned many posts back that they are taking over the project. I think they are waiting for Martin to give the green light

[jamcat]

it is not abandonwar. EvilDragon mentioned many posts back that they are taking over the project. I think they are waiting for Martin to give the green light

In other words, Martin is hedging, which means it probably isn't going to happen. I'm not going to wait around for the Great Pumpkin.

[AnX]

Move on then....you haven't lost anything anyway

[machinesworking]

Clearly PG-8X is abandonware, or, at the very least won't be updated for MacOS/M1 in the foreseeable future. At this point the best we can hope for realistically is that Arturia does the JX-8P in V-Collection 9.It's time to cut bait.

This right here is why I will no longer patronize small developers.

This was hardly a commercial venture. Donationware if you donated even, always has the possibility of stalling. We literally just got Destroy FX plug ins back in circulation something like ten years later. I save my ire or displeasure in upkeep etc. for things I pay for.