A Call for Roland Emulations

This may have been discussed before, but I thought one obvious by-product of the Roland-Cakewalk tie-up would be Cakewalk softsynth emulations of classic Roland synths. Maybe it’s still too early, but with the existence of already two excellent TB303 emulations (D16’s Phoscyon and Audio Realism’s Bassline), Arturia’s Jupiter clone, and now D16’s SH101 homage (Shioitor – don’t ask me how to pronounce that!) I’m wondering if the opportunity is slipping away.
 
It would be really cool to see a Roland legacy collection as lovingly and well executed as Korg’s. Another TB303 clone probably wouldn’t be worth the R&D, but seeing really accurate emulations of the Juno 60, Jupiter 8, SH101, System 100m or 700 modular, and D50 would be awesome. (TAL and Arturia came close, but no cigar, in the opinion of many.)
 
The D50, in particular, should be a no-brainer, because Roland have already ported the algorithms onto the VC1 expander card for their V-Synth.
 
Wants it!
 
 

Thanks for replying.

I hadn't looked at that. Thanks for pointing it out! I've only got Rapture LE at the mo (bundled with Sonar) but that is definitely a good reason for upgrading!

There is still a place for quality emulations, though, IMO. Korg, GForce Media, D16, Way Out Ware and others have made good business out of it. I take your point about picking synths to emulate, which is why I said there'd be no pont in developing another 303 clone. But, to my knowedge anyway, there aren't any really accurate emulations of other Roland synths - although we'll soon find out about Shioitor. The Arturia Jupiter by all accounts is a fine synth, but isn't a convincing copy according to people like Gordon Reid in SOS, who've had the opportunity to compare them.

The synths I mentioned are classics and have been in thousands of great recordings. In twenty years or so most of this hardware will be so much junk, outside of museums. If they could live on in software form it would be fine thing.

Cheers!

Yeah, I'm waiting for Imposcar 2 to be released as well. (Maybe some manic recoding going on after the release of Synth Squad?)

Absolutely agree with you about copyright, and one reason I had high hopes for Cakewalk coming out with a few Roland emulations is the close involvement of these two companies now. I don't know what arrangement Arturia has with Roland though...

Oh well, I'd like to think someone in Cakewalk read this, and some guy in the Tokyo headquarters of Roland is at this moment penning a directive...

Cheers!

it's quite CPU hungry etc? errmm

I think it's a bit late in the game to do emu's.. but who knows =)

I would love to see the roland virtual analog synth engine included in a future sonar.  And why not a v-synth emulation sonar already has variphrase?  USB d-beam?  It will be interesting to see what this marriage will bring.