Roland Clan Forums

Does anyone understand Rainlink? Both Tera Piano 7 tera byte version which is coming out? when? and Tera guitar rely on Rainlink.....do you have to have a keyboard that has Rainlink capabilities?
Will older Roland Keyboards like the Jupiter 80 be able to utilize Rainlink???????? or be updated to utilize Rainlink?????

I think it's main benefit is the increased definition in velocity levels, and the samples they're putting out for the Tera instruments are beyond the usual 0-127 midi velocity range, so you need both hardware and software to benefit on the increased resolution.

However, there's also a built in dither/randomisation built in to the high resolution plugins that will smooth out/distribute the standard 0-127 midi velocities into the related higher res values.

Think it's a bit of a sales gimmick personally, as getting a key bed uniform to those kind of accuracies for all octaves, particularly across black and white keys is practically impossible. But hey, it's good that they're thinking big.

So, no i can't see older hardware getting it as it's technically a hardware change, if they're seen updating older equipment to suddenly be 'high res' it kinda laughs in the face of their own technology.

Some new memory technologies are going to bankrupt this business model pretty soon.

We are on the verge of having fast, 16TB non-volatile RAM sticks available at good prices in a very few years.

We went form $2k instruments having ROM measured in kilobytes ...

... to $2k instruments having ROM measured in megabytes ... and recently gigabytes, or hundreds of gigabytes.

Soon, $2k instruments with a different kind of "ROM" (not really ROM) measureed in terabytes and dozens of terabytes.

This technology is almost dead on arrival.