Roland JV-1080 (VST Instrument)

Roland JV-1080 (VST Instrument)

Type	Fully-editable ROMPler VST Instrument
Manufacturer	Roland
Release date	2017
Parts	1
Max polyphony	128
Normal presets	512, with unlimited user presets
Drum presets	8, with unlimited user presets
Expansion	None
Effects	Reverb, Chorus, 1× MFX

The Roland JV-1080 VST is a virtual recreation of the JV-1080 module released in 2017. It is notable for being the first officially-sanctioned software recreation of the engine that powers the JV and XV units, based on the INTEGRA-7 engine. It is also notable among the enthusiast crowd for not being quite the same as the module, as it recreates another engine entirely.

Users can either purchase a life-time key for the virtual instrument, or commit a subscription to Roland Cloud to obtain it alongside many other instruments Roland offers as part of this service.

Notable differences

• As this is based on the INTEGRA-7 engine, it features 128 voices of polyphony, but unlike that synth there is only one part available. Users wishing to use performance presets will need to load multiple instances and tweak the effects accordingly.
• Because of the above, some effects are drastically different - the pitch shifter effect sounds much grainier and less pleasant overall (most notoriously in PR-C: 100 Vanishing), as an example.
• There are more effects incorporated than the base JV effects - 38 additional effects are available for a total of 78.

Oddities

• Unlike Korg's VST recreations of their own products, which typically include all expansion content, this VST does not include any of the SR-JV80 expansions included. As a matter of fact, there are no official SR-JV80 recreations released, possibly due to a conflict in licensing rights.
• Despite its name sake, it includes all of the JV-2080 presets, but omits the General MIDI bank.
• Also despite its name sake, it incorporates all of the XV-3080 waveforms. This makes it possible to incorporate the XV-3080, XV-5080, XV-5050 and XV-2020 specific banks in this VST.
• Banks are stored in a quasi-proprietary file format. Although there is rudimentary protection to prevent loading these banks into another compatible synth, it can be bypassed by hex-editing the file header to mimic another instrument's header. This applies to the JV-1080 VST, XV-5080 VST and all the software SRX recreations.
• It cannot load SysEx patches designed for it, users will need to meticulously recreate the patches by hand or use a script that converts sysex to the .bin format used by this instrument.
• The "size" parameters is used to determine how the plugin gets scaled up for HiDPI devices. Notably, it limits the choices available depending on the pixel density of the panel - normal 1920x1080 panels will have a limit of 125% resolution.