Just curious if Roland (Cakewalk) has any soft synths of their older hardware synths.  I have a Roland XV-88 and it has several patches that I really like.  I have went through quite a bit of the Dim Pro and TTS-1 patches and haven't found many of the patches that I like in my old XV-88.

I've seen samples of the XV-5080 which is the same synth as the XV-88 minus the keyboard...but they are listed as having something like 45 gigs of samples in their package.  The old hardware synths didn't have near this much ram.

Bottom line is...I'd like to have my XV-88 library available within Cakewalk.  Does it come down to having to buy yet another soft synth program such as Kontakt?  Or is this something that Roland and/or Cakewalk offers?

The engineers of those old synths were incredibly clever, as were the sound designers. I am holding on to my XP-30 with the same SR-JV80 expansion card series as can be used in the XV-88 - all because nothing sounds quite as good in all the sample based synths available for PC. Dim Pro is decent, Wusikstation at one point was decent, Kontakt is really very good - and is really the only contender.

Kinda what I figured.  The best electric piano I have found is a patch called "Hit Rhodes" in the XV-88.  Nothing in the soft synths come close to this patch in my opinion.

Oddly, hardware synth manufacturers have been reluctant to port their sound designs to software plugins. Roland doesn't do it. Yamaha doesn't do it. Aside from Korg, every software emulation I know of has been the work of third parties. It makes sense that a hardware vendor doesn't want to compete with their own products, but you'd think that wouldn't be an issue with discontinued products.

If you really, really want that patch in your computer, it can be done. Not easily or without cost, but it can be done. I have ported some of my favorite patches from my Yamaha MO8 over to Kontakt. It was time-consuming and I sure wouldn't want to port the entire soundset, but it's been very handy to have some of my most-used patches on disk.

Get Muz3eum for Rapture. It has some samples of Arp, Buchla, Roland Jupiter/Juno, EMS, Moog, Oberheim, Sequential Circuits, Yamaha and Waldorf synths. Plus its free as long as you have Rapture or Z3TA+ 2

http://patcharena.com/downloads/index.php?subcat=83&ENGINEsessID=26bc9a61eb2cbdd32f9a09af60cf2428

I just saw that its been updated for the Z3TA+ 2 also. 
http://patcharena.com/downloads/index.php?subcat=169&ENGINEsessID=788752eed700a211cad3bbb8c4ff3c7f

Thanks Bit...I'll check into that.  It's really not that big of a deal to me to go ahead and use the hardware stuff.  It just a matter of recording the tracks into the DAW.  But I've had people on here say that one should do everything "in the box".  I know they were referring to the recording aspect of it...but you still can't do everything in the box if you don't have the same sounds as your hardware counterparts.

It surprises me too, that Roland would not be willing to put their patches of a 12 year old synth into their own DAW.  But then again...I suppose the land fills would be filling up with old electronic instruments... :) .

Dave...thanks for the link...!  I'll check that out for sure.  I just upgraded to the Production Suite a couple of weeks ago, so I got the Z3TA+2.1 upgrade.

Dave, thanks for the reminder to pick up Muz3um for z3ta+2.