Unlike most of these kinds of posts, I know it exists or existed as I used to have it. Many years ago, I bought a USB stick with Roland XV5080 bootleg sample sets on them (I think they were "TrueSamples" or something) and there was a problem in the delivery, so the guy gave me a set of kontakt instruments that were made from the JD800 String Expansion Card (SL-JD80-04). I believe it was the full set. I ultimately threw away many of them as they sounded redundant with all the other samples I had then and only kept a few thinking if I needed them again, they'd show up on one of these sites.

Well, so many years later, I've never seen them again. I don't think anywhere. I would've kept them all and uploaded them myself if I thought I'd never see them again.

So I'm wondering if anyone else has ever seen or heard of these JD800 expansion card Kontakt sets before? I guess I don't even really need to re-find them, I just refound the JD80-04 samples I kept and got curious if anyone else knows of these or anything; or if any of the other JD800 expansion samples ever got turned into Kontakt libraries.

 

I looked and the only one I saw shared was: Roland JD-800 High Quality Pad Sounds for KONTAKT. And it is from ~2013.

Did you try the Roland Cloud version of the JD-800? There is also an RC XV5080 emulation.

 

I couldn't ever figure out which Roland Cloud VST was the JD800/990, if it was "Anthology 1993" or whatever, so I hadn't tried that one in their Cloud service. I guess there's a separate, stand-alone JD800 VST that I may or may not have known about, but does that have the expansions with it?

Anyway, yeah, I might be the only one around that still remembers this set of JD800 String Kontakt stuff. Maybe I should upload the incomplete set here or there or somewhere and see if anyone else can get a bead on them.

 

I'm on Mac. At one point, for Windows, R2R were releasing individual plugins, and later as a bundle. But the "Ultimate" version from witches was released in April 2026. The JD-800 is included, I just checked. There are quite a few expansions for all the synths/drum machines in Roland Cloud. Wether the specific patches you are looking for are included? You'd have to check, but I would take a fully editable virtual synth plugin version over a locked Kontakt instrument nearly every time. Being a rompler, you may have some luck on the specific patches.

 

I have a rare library with specific JD800 sounds. best service jd 800... its not really kontakt format but its one that i have since 2011 on my drive

 

I've tried that Best Service one and it's definitely not this one. This one had the entire JD80-04 instrument set and it was pretty well done.

I probably should just upload it somewhere. Maybe like musical-artifacts.com or something...

 

The Roland cloud version of the JD-800 uses .bin ROM image files for expansions banks. They all do. As of the June 2026 presets there are 512 of them available in the JD-800. Below is a list of them, 64 patches per bank. You can check on https://www.polynominal.com/site/studio/gear/synth/roland_jd800/index.html and find patches as system exclusive (.syx files) and then try to convert them to correctly built ROM .bin files using JDTools: https://github.com/sagamusix/JDTools. Or any other place you can try to find them.




This is the one you are asking about: https://www.polynominal.com/site/studio/gear/synth/roland_jd800/SL-JD80-04.htm

I compiled the JDTools source code for Mac, and it was completely painless. The Polynominal site has the .syx file for the JD80-04 expansion, but the name of it is: ROLAND4-SL-JD80-04 String Ensemble-NEED-SO-JD80-04-Waveforms.SYX. The sysex files for other cards are also in their pack.

If you have the waveforms for that expansion, they could probably be assembled with the .syx file and then converted to .bin. Once they are in .bin format, if the Cloud version can load them, you could autosample them and drop them into a homemade Kontakt, etc.

 

Last edited: Jul 9, 2026 at 3:27 AM