Roland Cloud

[superscan]

I know this thread is for shitting on Roland Cloud, and I agree with most of the complaints...

RCM is by far the most unstable management app I have installed: I am online nearly every day, and it still pops up with connection errors and/or forces me to sign in again every few weeks (I used to think the one by Korg was even worse, but they seem to have gotten their act together)

--
Marco

I’d say that Antares / Auto-Tune Central has an equally terrible solution. Nothing like re-running setup every day for it to function or the re-run license cleaner brush off.

Totally agree the authorization piece is easily solved with CR or iLok. What good is software if it doesn’t work when you need it?

[IvyBirds]

I know this thread is for shitting on Roland Cloud, and I agree with most of the complaints...

Counterpoint: this thread was opened in 2016 to discuss the Roland plugins. The reason why most people are focusing on the negative aspects of the Roland Cloud software is because since then:

the last new instrument has been released nearly two years ago

we are just 10 short days away now from the two year anniversary of the last new instrument being released

To put that into perspective, If on June 17th 2022 you casually started walking for just an hour or a day and you had left New York City on that day you would be coming into Los Angeles California right about now

[mdx4ever]

Why don’t we all (not satisfied Roland Cloud users), join Galaxias round table and hammer them with our gripes instead

[EfreetiSultan]

if the next reveal isnt either JP8000 or V synth im gonna assume them dead to me : (

[Examigan]

Why don’t we all (not satisfied Roland Cloud users), join Galaxias round table and hammer them with our gripes instead

Isn't Galaxias basically like Unify, except Unify can load nearly any developer's plugins (not just RC) and it can use more than 4 of them at once, etc. ?

[mdx4ever]

Why don’t we all (not satisfied Roland Cloud users), join Galaxias round table and hammer them with our gripes instead

Isn't Galaxias basically like Unify, except Unify can load nearly any developer's plugins (not just RC) and it can use more than 4 of them at once, etc. ?

It’s more like Reason Rack…

[N 4 LIFE]

Why don’t we all (not satisfied Roland Cloud users), join Galaxias round table and hammer them with our gripes instead

because they will just its a different dev team and they have no idea what's going on.

[IvyBirds]

Why don’t we all (not satisfied Roland Cloud users), join Galaxias round table and hammer them with our gripes instead

Because it will probably have the lead guy in charge of the GALAXIAS project on the call if you say anything remotely negative about it he will have a meltdown and verbally abuse people like he did on several web forums late last year when the product came out and people didn't fall all over themselves pretending it was the best thing since sliced bread

It's very obvious at this point that Roland doesn't actually care about the feedback their most loyal customers give them. It's all a marketing ploy. Even Jon bless his heart the Roland rep who comes there will tell you all about the latest Roland promotion but then turn around and tell you he is not a marketer

They act like telling us their subscriber base what's in the pipeline is verboten, like it's some kind of classified too secret missile system, when other companies do it all the time especially with subscription services

[electro]

Interested in AIRA Hardware vs Roland Cloud VSTInstruments. Are the drum plugins identical to the Hardware Boutiques recorded digitally?
Cloud TR-808
Cloud TR-909
Cloud TR-606
Cloud TB-303

[PAK]

Why don’t we all (not satisfied Roland Cloud users), join Galaxias round table and hammer them with our gripes instead

This is not a good idea because there appears to be two parts to Roland Cloud..

Roland Japan. This side does all of the DSP coding. Roland Japan’s management are the ones who must allocate time for their Japanese coders to fix things.

Roland Cloud (Seattle?) This part appears responsible for Roland Cloud Manager and the Galaxias hosting app. If they’re keen on feedback, about Galaxias, it’s likely because it’s something they can directly make improvements / fixes to!

For the other plugins it's very much at the mercy of Roland Japan. Keep this in mind whilst communicating with Roland Cloud itself. Some of them are probably as frustrated as end users, at this point, since they’re the ones who must take the flak for decisions outwith their direct control. All they can do is pass on any gripes.

For regional (non-English) support, I'm not sure of the situation - but they would basically do the same (pass on complaints). Though it is open to question how well this might be done given the Japanese language barrier. It does seem like Roland Japan presently under-estimates certain things. This isn't the hardware market, and users may permanently move to alternatives, like Softube, if it's seen that Roland can't fix bugs in a timely manner..

[shatteredmindofbob]

Question - I only use Zenology, do the other plug-ins load any faster? Or do they all have the same lengthy delay while they check with mommy and daddy to see if I'm allowed to them?

[IvyBirds]

It does seem like Roland Japan presently under-estimates certain things. This isn't the hardware market, and users may permanently move to alternatives, like Softube, if it's seen that Roland can't fix bugs in a timely manner..

I think what they don't get is the two main Synths that have the most mass market appeal are the Jupiter 8 and the various Junos. Ironically those are the ones that are most easily found in other plugins by other companies without RCM, subscriptions, and ongoing bugs

Drum samples from the 808 and 909 are everywhere and easy to get for free, and the 303 is popular in certain circles and genres but Roland themselves have fished that pond dry with hardware and the Behringer clone for $100 has blown it up

Where Roland has an advantage is the digital stuff that they can control copyrights over the samples.Thag would be the D50, JD800, JV, XV,

But the don't really have a JV or an XV they have the old Fantom from the early 2000s and sell it with a JV skin and a XV skin and they deliberately cripple it by making all of expansion cards and the samples on them separate instruments

That cash grab and that's all it is, is super insulting as all it takes is changing a few lines in the .bin file with a text editor and they all load just fine in one plugin. Hell you can download ROM files from the original cards from the net and even get those to run

It's just plain arrogance and disrespectful to your potential customers many of which are very seasoned audio people who can see right through it. Why Roland doesn't fix that is beyond me. I am not much a software programmer and I could make a "Super JV" with all of the expansion ROMs samples and presets from the SR-JV cards for the JV1080 using the existing software in a few hours at most, and do the same for the XV5080

But that would compete with the $30 a year Zenology subscription so Roland says no

[PAK]

Question - I only use Zenology, do the other plug-ins load any faster? Or do they all have the same lengthy delay while they check with mommy and daddy to see if I'm allowed to them?

No. They don't have the same delay. All of them load within 1 second here, which is faster than a lot of plugins load. It only impacts Zenology.

Right now Zenology load times here are 16 seconds. It was actually 7 seconds at one point(!), but this increased to 16 after I made an account change (which kinda confirms the delay is related to your Roland Cloud account and auth checks for all the preset banks). On my oldest PC system the delay is 35-40 seconds.

[vulpes777]

What day is it?

It's "cant-connect-to-rcm-service-day" for me.

Bonus: "Oh, there's an important performance update for RCM out. Weeell, since I was going to reinstall it anyway..."

>Zenology now crashes instead of just taking ages to load

At this point I don't think even P4L can keep me subscribed for another year.

EDIT: after a reboot now everything takes at least half a minute to start, including the two lifetime keys I have redeemed - and Zenology is still taking the entire DAW down the moment it finally loads. Serves me right.

EDIT2: I have downgraded to RCM 3.1.2 in order to get things running again.
--
Marco

[Examigan]

It connected for me here a minute ago when I tried it out, and was able to update RCM.