Roland XV-3080 trick

[Analog & Digital]

Here's a trick with the Roland XV-3080:  On the Smart Media card create a folder called "Roland" and put all your sound banks in there.....using the A-H bank buttons you can access the first 8 banks of 128 sounds on the card WITHOUT LOADING them.....that's 1024 sounds that can be ANYTHING....pretty cool....

 

I still like this rack synth a lot and will probably never sell it as it has such pure sound quality and is so quiet....."Nice Piano" with all effects removed is actually pretty good but I don't usually use it for acoustic piano but more for synths & pads.....it has alot.....it seems to have a lot more in this category than my Motif rack and it's 128 note polyphonic also.....you can find these on Ebay for about $300 - $350 all the time......I appreciate rack synths that have their own storage for sounds you make.....make sure to buy a 128 MB Smart Media card.....that is the biggest they make and it will hold a lot of sound banks....this synth also takes 2 SRX and 4 SR-JV80 expansion boards.....this synth is 2 rack spaces (the big brother to this is better, the XV-5080 because of the larger display and it holds 2 more SRX boards and it samples but they usually ask too much for those used).......sound-wise, they sound about the same:

 

Both have all the sounds from the JV-1080 & JV-2080 plus more.....here's demos of some of the JV-2080 sounds so you can get a better idea:

http://www.synthmania.com/jv-2080.htm

 

The sound "3 Osc Brass" is amazing and I have never found a better patch in any of my synths for "Toto - Africa"

 

With Roland JV synths, the patches were stereo because of the effects......the XV synths use stereo waveforms and I have never heard any problems with note stealing - even with my XV-5050 which is 64 note polyphony but I'm sure if you use any synth with 64 note polyphony with a sequencer, you run into that problem pretty quickly.....

 

My Yamaha TG500 (rack version of the SY85) is 64 note polyphonic and sometimes has problems with note stealing on performances, but also, this was one of the first synths with 64 note polyphony and so maybe it has poor voice allocation.....with standard voices, I don't hear note stealing (it does have a lot of sounds for an old Yamaha synth and some really nice pads.....I only paid $125 for mine with free shipping on Ebay and it's just like new but I think they usually cost more than that....if you ever get one of these, backup the user banks with a computer editor and do a factory reset to get the factory user banks back as those sounds aren't in the presets and there's some really nice ones):

http://www.synthmania.com/tg500.htm

 

Still, you're way better off with a Roland XV-3080 than a Yamaha TG500....you can store sounds you make to Smart Media card and it's 128 note polyphony and has much better sounds....you can also get a Smart Media card reader and backup all your sounds with Windows.....I never trust CD's for backing up data....only DVD.....what's weird is I never have audio CD's go bad.....only data CD's.....it's probably because with audio CD's the data is in much larger pieces.....I have had CD text disappear from my audio CD's before though (but that's probably more like data information and is probably much smaller pieces).....I know that audio CD's songs have size comparable to wave files which are very large....that's why you can usually only get 20-30 songs on an audio CD where you can get hundreds on a CD if they are 128 bitrate MP3's....

 

 I have used DVD's to backup data for years and I have never once had any DVD, that was burned correctly, ever go bad (I know this is true because if any disc doesn't burn right for me, and I have the software verify the burnt disc, I throw it away right then and there). The main difference I notice between DVD-R and DVD+R is anything burnt to a DVD+R can b e copied to both DVD+R and DVD-R with typical burning software like Nero or Sonic.....in order to copy DVD-R to a DVD+R disc, you have to copy the whole disc into a folder on the computer and then burn the contents of the folder to DVD+R.....I never burn "on the fly" either....I always have the software copying my disc put it on the hard drive and then it burns the copy from that....

 

  Originally DVD+R or DVD-R were the two formats that DVD players could read and usually one or the other.....now pretty much all DVD players read both but not all DVD players can read double layer discs yet (the double layer discs you burn at home)....many movies are double layer discs and those seem to play fine on all DVD players.....

 

When backing up files to DVD, once the data has been burnt you should highlight the folders of both the source and destination files, right click and choose properties on each and make sure the size is the same.....read the size on the TOP LINE of each as the bottom lines may not be accurate and will be different quite often.....this test lets you know that the data has been stored correctly.....