forgive me if these questions seem silly; i am not a musician, nor familiar with this stuff. my wife is interested in an electronic keyboard (accomplished pianist seeking fun new toy, composition aid, rehearsal aid, etc). on behalf of my wife, i am researching some "integration" issues.

at the moment, she is leaning towards a roland XP-80, but i suppose that if we found a controller with a great action, we could go with a JV-2080 instead, and sequence with software. for that matter, we have yet to look at the korg trinity line. as well, whatever way she decides to go, we could concievably end up with something like an XP-60 for travel/recitals.

all that said, my questions:

1) the korg trinity has a sampler, but with roland, can one sample/process using software or a module like the yamaha A3000, then import the result (on floppy, i presume) into the XP-60/80 and/or JV-2080?

2) are "blank" expansion cards available for the roland units to supply the user with additional capacity for his/her own forms/samples/patches?

my wife has a plethora of period instruments
on CD (can you say "lautenwerk"? :-), and
variations thereon, that she wants to have at her fingertips.

thanks!

You can't import samples into the JV2080 or any JV synth for that matter. But a few years back there were a lot of small companies who build in that option into 'regular' synths. But what I've learned from those developers is that Roland doesn't want to give other researchers their blueprints or any information of the synths so for the Roland I never saw any of that kind of equipment. I don't know if Roland has changed in that matter. Check the 'Frankfurter Messe' fair or any other big fair. 'cause on the big fairs you will find a lot of small companies who build those type of gadgets for synths and stuff.

As Daniel says the JV/XP synths are all ROM based with no RAM based sample support. ROM expansion is the only way to get new samples to use, and fortunately the JV/XP expansion card library is a pretty healthy selection of boards.

I very much doubt whether you would even find 3rd party products that do this, as the JV/XP samples aren't linear samples, but are a proprietary compressed PCM format (compression is around 2:1) that Roland does not release, so 16 bit linear samples will just not work even if you could kluge some sort of RAM board onto it.

Bottom line is if you need to sample, you better get a sampler.

Roland makes a lot of money on the expansionboards so they will not open the market for others, and they want us to buy all the expansion boards. Hopefully enough people will buy the Alesis Q-synths so that Roland is forced to include the sample import feature (dreaming...)

Why would you like to load samples? If you would like to use samples, then buy a sampler or use your computer as one. This is because the JV is, in essention, a synthesizer, and that means filters, envelopes and tone structures, which a sampler can't offer (although a yamaha A3000 comes quite far).

Furthermore is it almost impossible to produce a really good sample (Like Roland did!)