Roland Cloud

[Jon at Roland]

I got it to install and work last night. It's a total disaster IMO. Only thing I was looking forward to was stacking all my saved Zen presets from my user bank but of course those don't show up.
Already uninstalled.

Hey N 4 LIFE, do you mean you were having trouble finding your custom patches at all or finding them under the "Sound" tab?

I'm not sure what could have made it a "total disaster", but I'm happy to hear your feedback and report it back to the development team!

[chk071]

Hey everyone! For now GALAXIAS is a stand alone instrument. DAW compatibility will be released soon. We wanted to get it out there and allow for people to start exploring it earlier rather than later. This was a strategic choice we made, you can expect a DAW version asap.

I can help with these types of decisions going forward: musicians primarily use instruments as plugins inside DAWs. Standalone instruments are the edge case. So, if you're ever like, "hey, should we release the standalone first?" The answer should always be, "no, absolutely not! That's just going to take time and cost money for no real benefit to our customers. They want the plugins."

Glad I could assist.

roland will first listen if you guys cancel your subscriptions.

Forum reps really have a hard time here.

[Jon at Roland]

Hey everyone! For now GALAXIAS is a stand alone instrument. DAW compatibility will be released soon. We wanted to get it out there and allow for people to start exploring it earlier rather than later. This was a strategic choice we made, you can expect a DAW version asap.

I can help with these types of decisions going forward: musicians primarily use instruments as plugins inside DAWs. Standalone instruments are the edge case. So, if you're ever like, "hey, should we release the standalone first?" The answer should always be, "no, absolutely not! That's just going to take time and cost money for no real benefit to our customers. They want the plugins."

Glad I could assist.

Thanks for the feedback! There have been tons and tons of requests by musicians (especially performing musicians) for a stand alone Roland Cloud instrument since its inception. So I'm very happy to finally introduce this option and so many people are happy to see it. It will be compatible inside a DAW soon enough!

IMO, Galaxias is an excuse made up by Roland to avoid having ZERO new releases this year.

GALAXIAS was created by a separate team of developers than those who create our Legendary instruments and is included with an Ultimate Membership.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Forum reps really have a hard time here.

I sympathize with the forum reps. Particularly when they're put in a position where they have to defend unpopular decisions that they didn't make. But I do appreciate their presence. I just hope the feedback they get here works it's way up to the chain to the people who do make the decisions and plays a factor in improving the products in the future. I try not to beat anyone up too badly for just doing their job, but some decisions being made by big companies lately are total head scratchers and of course the discussion forums are where opinions will be expressed on those topics.

[D-Fusion]

Hey everyone! For now GALAXIAS is a stand alone instrument. DAW compatibility will be released soon. We wanted to get it out there and allow for people to start exploring it earlier rather than later. This was a strategic choice we made, you can expect a DAW version asap.

I can help with these types of decisions going forward: musicians primarily use instruments as plugins inside DAWs. Standalone instruments are the edge case. So, if you're ever like, "hey, should we release the standalone first?" The answer should always be, "no, absolutely not! That's just going to take time and cost money for no real benefit to our customers. They want the plugins."

Glad I could assist.

roland will first listen if you guys cancel your subscriptions.

Forum reps really have a hard time here.

They are sales promoters

They also give you excellent support behind the scenes if you have any problems or need help with something regarding your cloud account

So don't shoot the messenger that can help you when you need it since it will be harder to get support if they are gone.

Anyway. I am happy with their current Instruments even if i am not a fan of their newer 1-Trick pony Arp compared to The system 1 arp and it's plugouts plugins arp that you could do cool things with when using the scatter knob so on the newer ones i use Bitwigs built in Arp to get around it.

But i still would like to see a Jupiter 6, JP 8000-8080 and the alpha juno 1-2 and the V-Synth sooner rather than later but until then i will enjoy what i already have as lifetime keys in the Cloud.

[shatteredmindofbob]

Everyone's making comparisons to Analog Lab, but I thought Zenology was the Analog Lab equivalent... so ...what even *is* this?

[Arashi]

Everyone's making comparisons to Analog Lab, but I thought Zenology was the Analog Lab equivalent... so ...what even *is* this?

No, Zenology doesn't really have anything in common with Analog Lab. It's a full synth with a flexible engine (ZenCore) that has its own default synth (which is actually pretty decent), an XV-like engine for the digital sound libraries, and "model expansions" that configure the engine in different ways to emulate the behavior of various classic synths.

Galaxias is very similar to Analog Lab. It's a plugin host that lets you load multiple instrument and effect plugins and combine them into a super instrument. You can load four instruments (Analog Lab only supports two) and it has a lot more effects. It's not that exciting to me, but I could see it being useful to live musicians if they aren't already using MainStage or something else.

[shatteredmindofbob]

Everyone's making comparisons to Analog Lab, but I thought Zenology was the Analog Lab equivalent... so ...what even *is* this?

No, Zenology doesn't really have anything in common with Analog Lab. It's a full synth with a flexible engine (ZenCore) that has its own default synth (which is actually pretty decent), an XV-like engine for the digital sound libraries, and "model expansions" that configure the engine in different ways to emulate the behavior of various classic synths.

Galaxias is very similar to Analog Lab. It's a plugin host that lets you load multiple instrument and effect plugins and combine them into a super instrument. You can load four instruments (Analog Lab only supports two) and it has a lot more effects. It's not that exciting to me, but I could see it being useful to live musicians if they aren't already using MainStage or something else.

Oooh, I get it. I only have Core, so it's just a preset player for me, which is what I understood Analog Lab to be (or maybe that's Lab Lite or whatever it's called now).

[N 4 LIFE]

I got it to install and work last night. It's a total disaster IMO. Only thing I was looking forward to was stacking all my saved Zen presets from my user bank but of course those don't show up.
Already uninstalled.

Hey N 4 LIFE, do you mean you were having trouble finding your custom patches at all or finding them under the "Sound" tab?

I'm not sure what could have made it a "total disaster", but I'm happy to hear your feedback and report it back to the development team!

Jon, as much as I want to love everything you guys are doing, someone over there needs to listen to the clamoring here. I mean, come on man. At some point is anyone over going to listen to the requests? I used Roland gear on tons of albums starting in the mid 80's. How hard is it to just copy the performance patches on the early gear? Some of those were epic. And this new Galaxy thing is trying to still make the user work their ass off. None of us want to do that. Roland is like Apple after Jobs died. Lookie! Orange, Blue, Purple, and RAINBOWS YIPPEE. PROS DON"T CARE!!!!!

At some point Roland needs to think about audio quality and the great legacy left by the early guys. The Alpha wheel, D Beam, Handsonic, man all that shit was cool as hell. Now when I opened Galaxy thing the first thing I noticed is that even Zenology just sounds awful. Something wrong with the EQ curve, filters, processing chain. It just sounds awful. And forget about trying to do any drum programming on Zenology kits....compared to MPC Beats, Zenology has delays in the groove man. Roland NOT Grooving. At all. I could never have imagined that.Sad day in history man.

[fmr]

Hey everyone! For now GALAXIAS is a stand alone instrument. DAW compatibility will be released soon. We wanted to get it out there and allow for people to start exploring it earlier rather than later. This was a strategic choice we made, you can expect a DAW version asap.

I can help with these types of decisions going forward: musicians primarily use instruments as plugins inside DAWs. Standalone instruments are the edge case. So, if you're ever like, "hey, should we release the standalone first?" The answer should always be, "no, absolutely not! That's just going to take time and cost money for no real benefit to our customers. They want the plugins."

Glad I could assist.

Don't bother. Roland have shown, over and over, they don't give a s*** to what users think and want.

[vulpes777]

Let me join the others in saying that no one is blaming the messenger for this curve ball of an announcement. The problem I have with Roland, and one that they don't seem to be aware of, is that if they want to make the subscription model substainable, there have to be a number of meaningful updates, throughout the year. The "Wow! I sure was missing that!" kind.

I mean, four or five of us have come up with VERY different instruments we'd love to see part of Roland Cloud, there are longstanding complaints about features that were never properly polished after launch; no one here is demanding NEW ACB EVERY WEEK PLZ...but at the same time, with so many things Roland could have dove to keep the interest of the subscribers alive, I don't think a software that does what most DAWS and standalone hosts already do, was SO in high demand.

Source (seriously, this time around): I have been subscribed for two years, the second year it turned into the dreadful "two 16-patch Zen-core expansions a week and not much else", which bloated the catalog a lot and I can't help but thinking it is partly responsibile for the Zenology load times.

This is when I decided I was out, there simply wasn't there enough content I liked to keep me subscribed. Then Zenology 2 came along, then the version 2 of certain ACB plugins came along, then there was another round of Play4life. I hopped on again, thinking at least I could get free lifetime licenses for some intruments I wouldn't be able to get from the competition...but then things got really quiet again, and unless something changes, I suppose I'll redeem my d50/jv/xv keys and then peace out.

tl;dr By no means I mean to speak for every RC user, but there's one thing I'm sure of:

https://www.rolandcloud.com/news

Right now, this is not enough to keep my motivation to stay subscribed up.

Regards,

--
Marco

[Atlatnesiti]

The last new instrument was:
https://www.rolandcloud.com/news/the-jupiter-4-is-here
That was almost 1 and half year ago…

[vulpes777]

The last new instrument was:
https://www.rolandcloud.com/news/the-jupiter-4-is-here
That was almost 1 and half year ago…

That, and most of the earlier digital instruments have pretty much been abandoned:

troughout their respective life three expansions have been released for the JV and ONE for the XV.

The SRX cards are still handled as separate plugins and not even all of them have been released.

I think the display bug is still there, as someone at Roland sneakily updated the library names to make them shorter, so that they don't overlap with the patch name in the GUIs.

There has been a grand total of ONE effect plugin released: the Juno Chorus, which is fine and iconic and all, but...Roland? The same Roland that made the Space Echo not releasing their "official" plugin? The same Roland that under the Boss brand has made some of the most appreciated guitar pedals did not think for one moment to release their own virtual stompbox? Roland not releasing a standalone TB303 filter??

I could go on for much longer; this is why I say there's so much that could be done with the Roland Cloud catalog...and this is why I'm so underwhelmed by Galaxias

--
Marco

[fmr]

The SRX cards are still handled as separate plugins and not even all of them have been released.

The is one of the shameless movements made by Roland. Compare this to how Korg handled the M series, Triton series, which came, right from the beginning, with ALL the expansion cards built in.

And I suspect Roland is slowly preparing the fading out of all the individual software instruments (ACB based) keeping only Zenology and Zenology based modules. Abandoning projects is something they have been done over and over in the past.

I supported and subscribed to Roland Cloud ONLY because of the Legendary instruments. And I believe the vast majority of users are in the same position. Future will tell.

[WatchTheGuitar]

I think Galaxiass is kind of Analog Lab meets Rob Papen Prisma. I’ll stick with not resubscribing and using Plugin Guru Unify if I want that layering capability, it’s more mature and plays well with third party plugins.