ROLAND DISCOVER5 Discontinued

Discover 5 has good sounds, but you must work with every song and track a lot befor it sounds the best. It is not a "plug and play" (pray ?) K-board, that you can use to play downloaded midis on the fly. You have to work with this k-board. Vocal harmonizer and vocal effects part is very good. Good instrumnet for different types of music and even on the big stage

As a first exposure to attempting to use sequenced music, the DISCOVER5 was like gold falling into my lap. MIDI Files- MIDI files are not standardised in the way they are formatted to download into such an instrument - Generally, the midi retailer ref number is what will appear in the song title on screen, which adds up for 500 - 600 songs. The Discover5 sets a precedent for how midi files SHOULD be formatted for instrument downloading. This raises the issue of separate Text documents for lyrics which have to be separately downloaded and timed in...sometimes... Some bought files are pretty well ready with lyrics, song name, song writer all in the correct slots on the Discover5 screen when you download, but generally, there's a lot of work to do because of lack of midi file standards. VOLUME It seems changing the song/keyboard Master Volume dial drops the song volume, when all you really wanted to do was turn up the keyboard solo you were going to do, meaning your mixer has to be in your lap all the time. CUBASIS Volume differences using midi reading software such as Cubasis, and then alternating to using songs off the Smarmedia Card means the same thing. I'm not sure how much of this is relevent to Discover5, but music derived from the midi playing software is markedly quieter, but it could be me. I notice you can't use the fad out button using software either, which is a point to note. TEMPO Excellent ability to rig tempo on the fly. SONG CHAINS As with a CD where you can skip say the first few tracks, it seems to me a problem to l through the chain to start say a third the way through. A chain could mean an awful lot of songs. SMARTMEDIA I loaded a batch of songs, then added more and did a complete reload of all the songs, and the DISCOVER5 does regular shut-downs with the flashing Play button to tell you that it's time to restart the machine. It MAY be that card, and of course the undersigned hasn't been live with the gear yet, but there seems to be some regular freeze-ups here of late. When the balance of midi files have arrived and a new 128 card loaded up, we'll see. By the way, what's with the 64 card with a new machine. It's guaranteed that anyone in the market for a machine as powerful as this will be needing more than 64 for their songlist...I think. TOUCH The machine feels pretty light for an accoustic player, but it was nice to find a hit-pressure option. Nice one Roland. FLOPPY DISK Shame about that. Way out of date. LYRICS DISPLAY Make sure yo