Roland Cloud - now has JV 1080!
 

I've written a few messages about Roland Cloud lately. At first I really didn't like the idea of the subscription model, but I do like the idea that you get to permanently keep one of the instruments for each year you stay subscribed, which if you like the plugins (some are must haves for me, such as the Juno), pretty much negates the monthly cost.

Now the cool part is you get these random additions to the instruments. All of a sudden a JV 1080 just magically drops into your studio (and yes, it is a dead ringer for the iconic hardware JV 1080). Yeah its a ROMpler but a damn good one. Oddly, like the other Roland plugins it is a CPU hog, but I really think a System 8 or similar Roland synth is in my future so I'm not too focused on that.

So if you haven't tried the 30 day trial of Roland Cloud, you should just to play around with the Juno, Jupiter, D50 and JV1080 emulations. Roland really seems to be getting its shit together lately, while other synth makers that shall remain nameless seem to be sitting on their thumbs.

UPDATE:

Roland has sweetened the deal on this, so that if you've been a member for more than a year, you get two free instruments for life instead of one. For me, honestly the Juno-106 plugin alone is worth a years subscription. I probably won't keep the subscription going too much longer; I personally think it would have been a smarter business decision for Roland to just charge an amount nobody would feel at all bothered with, like $5 a month, just to keep it off the cancellation-candidate radar.