System 8 - Poly Plugouts.

[papasan]

Unfortunately, Roland's keenness for built-in obsolence means they'd rather see us throw the synth away and buy a new one a few years down the line when it's no longer supported.

Throw away? Hardly. I have a Jupiter-6 and its still making the same beautiful sounds since 1983. Along with a bunch of other great Roland classics. I'm pretty sure the S-8 will give me years of great noise too.

[GilgaFrank]

Unfortunately, Roland's keenness for built-in obsolence means they'd rather see us throw the synth away and buy a new one a few years down the line when it's no longer supported.

Throw away? Hardly. I have a Jupiter-6 and its still making the same beautiful sounds since 1983. Along with a bunch of other great Roland classics. I'm pretty sure the S-8 will give me years of great noise too.

I was referring to the policy common to all manufacturers of ceasing to issue drivers for newer operating systems. If everything worked like the Jupiter 6 then I wouldn't be complaining but ending support for old hardware is a trick many manufacturers use to enforce obsolescence

[zombietactics]

It's a pity Roland won't see sense and make the Plugout standard open source. Allowing third parties to develop plugouts would be a terrific boost for System-8 owners while sparing Roland the embarrassment of copying other manufacturers' designs. ...

Roland and Korg now both market instruments which use Virtual-Instrument technology.

What neither of them seemed to have realized is the "Apple iPhone" model. Apple doesn't write or perform music, they don't produce movies, and they don't write a lot of software. What they do provide (with the iPhone and iPad) is a platform to play/run all of those things ... and they get a cut from every song/movie/app sold.

If they could overcome their insular, cultural predilections ... there is a TON of money to made.

[Saxifraga]

Not much more to ask for.

I think it's fair to ask for better allocation of voices across splits. Why not let me load an SH-101 and keep 7 voices on a poly? Or just have 4 voices on the 101 like the System-1? Or imagine if you load 2 monos - you lose 75% of the voices... why? There is no justification for this I can think of other than to preserve sales of the Boutiques.

The problem is that they load ONE ACB model into ONE processor board and that can produce 1..4 voices. They would have to overhaul the single voice System-1/1m Plugouts to produce polyphony on the System-8.
As always Roland has better things to do than support their loyal customers.
At least they produced a V1.30 in the meantime with a JX-3P and many more features.

[mockba_the_borg]

I have sent a message to Roland support asking if they have anything new coming to the system 8 now that the Jupiter X (AMB technology) is out. Or if the ACB technology is over and I should let go of my system 8 towards the Jupiter X.
I just got back the generic "our ACB technology is not over".
But if course nothing regarding what new is coming to the System8.
Then I replied to the request asking very specifically then what new we should see released for the System8 in terms of polysinths. From that moment on the support went silent. No reply.
So I guess you guys know what this means.
We can go ahead and think "what else to ask for?" I guess.

[Stormchild]

I have sent a message to Roland support asking if they have anything new coming to the system 8 now that the Jupiter X (AMB technology) is out. Or if the ACB technology is over and I should let go of my system 8 towards the Jupiter X.
I just got back the generic "our ACB technology is not over".
But if course nothing regarding what new is coming to the System8.
Then I replied to the request asking very specifically then what new we should see released for the System8 in terms of polysinths. From that moment on the support went silent. No reply.
So I guess you guys know what this means.
We can go ahead and think "what else to ask for?" I guess.

It means support doesn't have any knowledge of products in development, and wouldn't be allowed to discuss it even if they did.

Of course they're not moving away from ACB. It's still their best emulation technology for accurately reproducing the subtle nuances of the original hardware. The ABM models in the Jupiter-X/Xm are optimized for higher polyphony, which they achieve by modeling the overall character of analog synths instead of aiming for component-level accuracy. Different tradeoffs for different goals.

As for the System-8, new plugouts would be nice but aren't necessary. The synth already includes all three plugouts that were promised and has gotten numerous updates with significant improvements to the System-8 engine as well. It's already an amazing synth. The only thing I expect them to do at this point is make sure the driver keeps working with new versions of macOS and Windows. Anything else is a bonus.