Roland cloud plugins causing crash

David-san · July 13, 2021, 8:18pm

I like this answer from GP forum member @Vindes

Roland Sound Canvas VA freezes / Lost Program Changes

My experience over the years is Roland has tried to get into and out of the “software” side of the business a number of times, pulled back, gone back in, etc.

Like a lot of software companies, when they pull back they don’t “delete” the software they previously developed. They just leave it out there, closer to “abandoneware” then “supported software.”

Sound Canvas, despite being available today through Roland Cloud, is still abandonware from my point of view. I haven’t touched it in at least five years, but even then it struck me as dated and unsupported.

Roland is now trying to make a software comeback again, this time centralizing on the Zenology/Zen-Core platform. The idea there is to have a common platform where Zenology (the VSTi) patches will sound exactly the same as those on the hardware synths. Kind of like what Line 6 is doing with Helix. Software and hardware all running a common platform so you can move patches seamlessly across hardware and software.

The net result today, from my experience, is that older Roland VSTs that don’t fit neatly into the Zenology/Zen-Core platform may still be available and supported on Roland Cloud, but they results can be mixed.

I like Zenology, and that’s clearly where their development efforts are focused. But that’s still a work in progress. In my experience it’s not any more of a CPU hog than any other analog synth modeler package (e.g. Arturia Analog Lab V) but I say that with the caveat that I’m a “try the presets, find a few I like” kind of user when it comes to analog synths.