Spoke to tech support today re: OS2 "bug"

[Pighood]

Apparently, the OS 1.5 PCM waves are "locked." Apparently, Roland USA is in the process of trying to obtain a license from Roland Corporate in Japan for these waveforms so poor saps like us can access them by merely loading the "old.prj" deal.

At present, the only way to play your OS 1.51 sounds is to reload OS 1.51. Pain in the ass, but at present it's the only way.

I likened the situation to the tech support guy to loading & saving sounds from the Jupiter-8 (remember the tape recorder interface and the glowing red LED?).

[soundman]

Hello,

I also spoke with Roland US tech support regarding the same thing and received a similar response. I am of the opinion that giving manufacturers honest feedback can produce results if enough customers do so.
While I understand their own desire to protect their intellectual
property (the 1.x waves), there is no reason why upgrading any product should render your previous work unuseable.

Regards,


LWG

[Pighood]

Absolutely agree. After all, this ain't Kazaa...those who have OS2 have already paid for the hardware end, yes?

[ArghBlarg_]

Since I heard the heads up about the ROM waves changing with the 2.0 upgrade, I spent an hour and sampled all 324 (?) of them at 48KHz/16bit digital... the resulting WAV is about 150 MB but if someone desperately needs a particular wav from v1.51 let me know, I could probably send individual ones to people..

The other steps that would need to be done to reconstruct all the pre-2.0 patches would be:

1) take each of these waves, put them on a 1.51 V-Synth card-based project;
2) copy each preset to the same card-based project
3) change the PCM wave used by the copied preset to point to the card-resident wave..

As well, any of the internal ROM waves marked with a '+' have beat data on them, which would need to be re-created in the card-based copy... lots of work but it would be doable (note I'm not volunteering to re-construct them all! Hah)

Error 144 - Reboot? Y/N

[gregae]

Glad to hear that RolandUS is taking some action on this. For the life of me I can't understand why they abandoned the 1.51 ROM waves when they went to V2.0. Makes no sense to me not to have backward compatibility with 1.51 patches.

ArghBlarg - would you consider posting your WAV files here (assuming you have a speedy connection to upload and the forum site can accept something that large).

Greg

[philicorda]

I'd really like get back the mellotronish strings and flute samples.

Out of interest, does anyone know how do to seamless sustain looping with variphrased samples? Not looping the whole sample, just the sustain part of, say a piano sample.

Some of the rom samples do this, but I cannot seem to get the ones I make to do so without glitching. Perhaps they are created on a computer with a special program or something.

[ottovr]

I also spoke to tech support last week and was told that they are working on creating another OS download for OS 2.0 that will include all the waves from OS 2.0 (where they are now), along with the 1.5 waveforms numerically following them. This update will have all the old patches tied into the new locations of their old waveforms. This will allow you to first identify which of the new patches you want to keep and then, once you load this in, you will then be able to ioverwrite those 1.5 patches you don't want anymore and you will have the best of both worlds. You can do this with a USB cable, but now it seems worth buying a 1GB Compact Flash Card w/ PCMCIA adaptor (under $100 together) and being able to instantly load in either groupd of patches, if you must have them all, in a much more convenient transfer environment. Look for the next release in a few weeks (so I was told)...OvR

[ArghBlarg_]

gregae - Sure, I am only too happy to post 1.51 waves if anyone needs them -- but the whole thing, raw as captured from my board, was over 150 MB. So I will need to trim it (perhaps each wav into a separate file with a bit of spare space for people to trim them as they see fit for looping) and ZIP it up into something more manageable.

I will work on this over the coming week and give it to the site, if Roland doesn't make any announcement of course in the interim.

Error 144 - Reboot? Y/N

[gregae]

Ottovr - That's great news, and thanks for sharing! Makes you wonder why Roland didn't consider this before.

ArghBlarg - As Roland appears to be pursuing a solution that will give us back all the 1.51 waves, thanks for the offer, but I can wait a few weeks to see what Roland releases. (I have no hot projects going on right now)

To all - I tried the V-Synth librarian (Macintosh version) with V2.0 and it seems to work correctly. This should be a handy utility to combine V1.51 and V2.0 patches once Roland completes the fix.

G

[robnet]

Ottovr, that's very good news. I'm surprised that there's enough space to join both the v2.0 and v1.51 waves. I'm also surprised indeed that they didn't think of this before Roland released the new OS. Anyway, this looks like a good solution. Can't wait for that new OS release!

[Dinos]

Well... I got a different response from a Roland guy. I was at the MusikMesse last week, and I asked one of the guys at Roland's booth (I also got to talk with Mr. Nishiwaki.... weird fellah.... . So, about the ROM samples, there is no update on the works. It's a size issue. V-Synth's ROM is not big enough to include both soundsets. So, Roland officially just "gives original V-Synths users the chance to use the new OS, even though they're bound to lose the old patches using the ROM waves". I also got an "unofficial" tip though. Roland doesn't support this, and it's not guaranteed to work but here it is. Just use the .bin file to do the upgrade (which is the one including the new features) and skip the .rom file (which includes the new patches/waves). You may face some difficulties, and the Soundshaper feature is not going to work (since it uses the new patches), but if you have programmed many patches yourself... I guess it's worth it.

Oh, other info on the new OS: there were some rumors that there's a way to use the USB to stream audio with the original v-synth, but unfortunately this is not the case. It's something that has to do with hardware, and is never gonna happen. About the price, as far as I can remember the XT is gonna be a lot cheaper than the original. Suggested Retail price for the original (for Germany) was something like 2,900 Euros, and the XT is gonna be out for something like 2,180. Fair enough, me thinks.

[robnet]

If this is true, then the V will be the last piece of Roland gear I'll ever buy.

This is just ridiculous. I was promised by Roland Benelux that the V was an 'open' platform, and that they would keep developing for it. They never told me that I would have to trash my old patches, if I would want to use the new OS.

What they have to do is take the v1.5 waveforms and hand them over to us, free of charge, in a project that also holds the v1.5 patches. Now it seems that Roland Japan doesn't want to unlock the waveforms, and since the V cannot hold both old and new waveforms they tell us, original V owners, to f***-off.

Great customer service Roland. I love it. Thank you very much.

[Cromio]

I also samples all the preset waves from 1.51
I'm in the (long) process of triming them

but the all thing (as it is) is under 40MB!

read about my concerns in another post under the topic: "V2?"

[robnet]

Cromio, I appreciate the work you do, but what I'm pissed about is Roland's attitude towards the whole matter. I payed a LOT of money for their 'flagship' V synth, and by the looks of it, they let us drown now.

I'm also worried a little by the resampling process to recover the old v1.5 waveforms. The encoding will probably be different, the loop points are different, the sound may be different. Who knows that Roland 'did' with these waveforms.

But maybe it's the only way indeed.

[Cromio]

My idea is also: if Roland knows that the waves will stil be available through other methods, they are not really deffending anything, so they maight aswell released them properly along with the patches.

The resampling process I'm using is through SPDIF to my computer, I used the same definition as stated on the samples.

Of course, loop points don't come automatically with the samples, that will need to be recreated.

But what I want is this nice samples (more than the patches)
I'm not an acomplished musician and I like to work with a piano sound to discover and workout some tunes.

1.51 has some nice acoustic piano sounds, completely gone in V.2 (along with other interesting stuff)
I also don't want to ditch the new samples of V.2, in terms of percussion sounds V.2 is much better (that's why I'm also not very worried about the possibility of not being able to recover the sample menus of V.1.51)

it's all fun anyway, to try to remake the ols patches will also be a nice way to discover the tweaks of the V-Synth