Roland ZENOLOGY Pro on sale on Roland's website!

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Zenology Pro$229.00Buy

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cryophonik wrote: Sun Jun 08, 2025 11:01 pmWhen I hit refresh on it to see if I was seeing a cached page or something, it briefly flashed a cached version of the original page showing the regular and sale price before immediately jumping to the current page with the $99 price. Maybe this is now the permanent price?
Good catch, and I think you may be correct.

Zenology is a vehicle for them to sell you more products and services. It’s not in their interests to have a higher barrier to entry. So it's likely this may be the case. We'll see :)

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Soon to be half off :)

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I noticed for Sweetwater it says “Price Drop” versus “Sale” or whatever it was.

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Sale is over on RC site, and Play4Life is running now

It's still on sale at Sweetwater if anyone's interested.

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They've raised the price in RCM now, to $299. That's a $70 price rise! So much for $99.
Maybe reverting to a higher price most of the year, in order to prompt purchases when on sale?

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PAK wrote: Tue Jun 10, 2025 10:28 pm They've raised the price in RCM now, to $299. That's a $70 price rise! So much for $99.
Maybe reverting to a higher price most of the year, in order to prompt purchases when on sale?
What they really want is subscriptions and the recurring revenue that comes from them. But it wouldn't surprise me to see the $99 deal twice a year immediately before the semiannual Play 4 Life.

$99 Zenology Black Friday Deal, followed by Play 4 Life through Christmas

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They have the Play4Life deal now, but the only synths I "might" want to keep are the Jupiter or JD-800. At least I'd get Zenology Pro for a year that way.

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[dup from GS post]

This Zenology sale piqued my interest in picking up traditional Roland sounds via soft synth plug-ins. I grabbed the $99 lifetime Zenology Pro package. Hundreds of sounds, and editable. So.. for me, was a win.

What I discovered along the way ( the last couple of weeks) was that there is more in the Zenology ecosystem that I may want to pick up.The Roland store has add-on sound packs that add additional patches to the ones included in Zenology Pro. I grabbed a couple of those. They also have “model expansions” which are the fuller replica of the software instruments they emulate.. along with additional control of their timbres.

This whole setup is similar to the Arturia V Collection and Analog Lab. Arturia V Collection is a suite of instruments and their presets, and many are included in Analog Lab Pro. Similarly.. Zenology has a suite of sounds and expansions. The Zenology Pro is similar to Analog Lab Pro in that it has cherry picked sounds from the Roland plug-ins. A key difference is Zenology Pro gives arguably more editing capability to the included sounds than Analog Lab Pro does. In fact - if you want to edit much more than very basic stuff, you need to purchase Arturia’s plug-ins. Not so with Zenology Pro, though the model expansions give access to some additional stuff in the timbres. There are other big benefits of the Zenology ecosystem if you happen to also own the hardware version of their synths. Full integration. Nice.

For me… looking for software equivalent of traditional Roland timbres, along with lifetime keys.. this was a win. I’ll add Roland Plug-ins in the future, to pick up the fuller range of editing and presets… but will wait until lifetime keys for those become ~$49 or so. In. The meantime … hundreds of presets have been added to my repertoire for $99. Again… a win for me.

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Just to add there seem to be two types of sound packs.

Some simply are additional presets, the other more expensive ones have additional samples. Then the model expansions are at a higher level again. But it's worth looking at the ones that have additional samples, I think they are usually priced around $20?
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jdoo wrote: Thu Jun 12, 2025 5:18 pm
What I discovered along the way ( the last couple of weeks) was that there is more in the Zenology ecosystem that I may want to pick up.The Roland store has add-on sound packs that add additional patches to the ones included in Zenology Pro. I grabbed a couple of those. They also have “model expansions” which are the fuller replica of the software instruments they emulate.. along with additional control of their timbres.
If you are going to start adding a bunch of extras to Zenology you may as well just get the $99 a year plan when they run the play for life deal like they are doing now

You get Zenology Pro and all of the expansions, presets, and sample add two of the other instruments to use for a year. After a year if you cancel you get to keep one of those instruments. Then you can re-up for another year and get another life time key and get to use two additional instruments

Considering the model expansions cost $149 a piece you can subscribe for many years and still be ahead, plus you would end up with many lifetime keys for the other instruments and if they drop new content you get access to that immediately without any extra costs

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Those prices are way too high. Roland should take a look at Korg’s pricing.

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ChamomileShark wrote: Thu Jun 12, 2025 5:25 pm Just to add there seem to be two types of sound packs.

Some simply are additional presets, the other more expensive ones have additional samples. Then the model expansions are at a higher level again. But it's worth looking at the ones that have additional samples, I think they are usually priced around $20?
And just to add to that, some of the preset packs that are just 5 or10 bucks and look good value only have about 20 or 30 presets...
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telecharge wrote: Sat Jun 07, 2025 2:52 pm
Examigan wrote: Sat Jun 07, 2025 1:32 pm My issue against getting it is that at $99, I could get something with more features.
My take is that you don't buy this for synthesis capabilities.
jdoo wrote: Sat May 10, 2025 11:51 pm So in total - there are

4107 Tones
109 Drum Kits
4246 all together.... but i was quickly counting, didnt confirm any of this
^^^ You buy it for this -- thousands of Roland "tones"

FWIW, Roland Cloud offers a 30-day trial membership and ZENOLOGY Lite is free with a Roland account.
That's pretty on point.

Zenology Pro is full packed with classic and very usable patches, from the JD, JV and XV series. In general, I don't use presets and I like to do my own sounds, but these patches are so good and classic, instant 90s vibe. Much more usable than the Korg Triton plugin in my opinion.

I also tested the synth expansions, this is a completely different approach to me and personally it feels a bit weird inside Zenology. I would rather prefer a separate plugin.

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Yeah, love all those Zenology presets (over 3000) in my Roland hardware keyboards. But for software, Korg can’t be beat. Just listen to their M1 and Wavestation. Or to Poly Six and MonoPoly. Those are perfect software emulations. And at a pretty, pretty price point.

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Why Zenology Pro (VST3 Win version) has many automatable VST parameters but only the ones visible on the Basic page (Cutoff, Reso, Attack, Release, Vibrato) react to automation in Cubase Pro 15 ?

Is this a feature... or just a huge bug?

thanks,
B.

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