Hello!

I recently acquired a Roland JD-800. I also bought an old set of patches for it, which was supposed to exist for both the JD-800 and the JD-990, but I only received a file for the JD-990. Since it's an old patch set, the seller was no longer able to provide the file for the JD-800. However, knowing that the two banks should be practically identical, I went ahead and looked for JD-990 to JD-800 patch conversion tools, which don't seem to exist. And of course that makes sense in the general case because the JD-990 has more features, making such a conversion tool inherently lossy. But since I knew I can get those patches to work on a JD-800, I went ahead, studied the SysEx formats of both synths and wrote a conversion tool. Et voilà - I have working patches for the JD-800 now!

But I didn't stop there - I wanted to to achieve what Roland has denied to us so far - using JD-800 patches with the JD-800 VST or the JD-08.
I'm actually not a user of the VST nor do I have a JD-08, I just wanted to get this done out of spite. It was quite a lot of work to reverse-engineer the patch format of the plugin, because it contains a pre-computed copy of each ZenCore parameter (for playback) plus a copy of the original JD-800 parameters (for the UI), and both need to be set correctly in the file. But on the upside, once I figured this out, I could see that the JD-08 uses the exact same patch format, so most of the work for supporting that was already done.

Without further ado - you can get the tool at https://github.com/sagamusix/JDTools - Windows executables are provided, on other systems you will have to compile the CMake project. This is a simple command line utility, no fancy GUI or anything - because that's exactly what I needed. It should be easy to build an easier-to-use GUI tool on top of this one, though.

What can it do?
- Convert JD-800 SysEx dumps to JD-990 and vice versa
- Convert JD-800/990 SysEx dumps to the JD-800 VST / Zenology BIN format and vice versa
- Convert JD-800/990 SysEx dumps to the JD-08 SVD format and vice versa (requires an existing JD08Backup.svd file to write the patches into)
- Convert JD-800/990 SysEx dumps to the "hardware ZC1" format (SVZ), as exported by Zenology. I have no idea which hardware synths can use that.
- And of course converting between BIN / SVD / SVZ formats
- Merge one or more SysEx dumps containing "temporary" patches into a patch bank. So for example if you have a MIDI file demonstrating individual patches one after another by uploading them into the temporary edit area, this tool can create a SysEx bank out of that.
- List all patch contents and more stuff from any of the supported formats.

Not all of the conversions are lossless, but the tool will print on the command line if there's any loss in the conversion process.

Most excellent, top Marks !

Quick update - The generated JD-08 backup files were not accepted by the device. As I cannot figure out yet how to generate a valid JD-08 backup file that doesn't contain all the sequencer patterns, system settings and so on, version 0.11 of JDTools now requires you to provide an existing JD08Backup.svd file as an output file for the tool. It will then overwrite the patches in the existing file with the converted patches. There might be ways to work around this requirement in a future version, but for now this is all we have.

Another small update:

• Converting a patch with tempo-synced delay taps or LFO rates to JD-800 SysEx now approximates the delay / rate. A tempo of 120 BPM is assumed.
• LFO offset + and - were swapped when converting from JD-800 SysEx to BIN / SVD / SVZ or vice versa.
• Support BIN files created with newer plugin versions.

As always, get the latest version from https://github.com/sagamusix/JDTools/releases

Time to get converting - thanks man!
http://bobbyblues.recup.ch/roland_jd...0_patches.html

Loving the way websites used to be

To save you some time, all of the stuff from BobbyBlues' website has already been converted: https://sagagames.de/stuff/JD-800_Al...for_Plugin.zip

Great work!!
A n00b question hehe. When you do the conversion to JD-08 backup file . how can you determine the position (bank and number) of the files that you are adding? (so i don't lose factory presets & custom presets)

Unfortunately this isn't possible at the moment, the tool will always start overwriting from patch A11 onwards. I couldn't really figure out a convenient way yet to customize this, but maybe just an additional parameter to specify which bank to copy the patches into (A/B/C/D) could do the trick.
In theory another option would be to convert the backup file to SVZ/BIN and then rearrange the patches in Zenology, but currently SVZ/BIN export limits the converted files to exactly 64 patches because I noticed that the JD-800 plugin simply crashed with banks that had e.g. 60 patches instead of 64 when trying to access the patch list. And of course not every JD-08 user has access to Zenology, so this solution would not be helpful for everyone.

ohhh ok . it will help me anyway because i can use it to convert sysex to bin and be able to open them in the jd-800 plugin (so i can recreate them after on jd-08 manually). right ??

That is possible, sure, but probably quite a lot of work since there are effectively a few hundred parameters per patch if all tones are used. I'll see if there is a sensible way to make SVD file creation more flexible, but cannot promise anything specific right now.

Version 0.13 allows the position at which patches are inserted into SVD files to be specified. Get it at https://github.com/sagamusix/JDTools/releases

There is now a new optional parameter when converting patches to SVD format. For example, "JDTools convert svd input.syx JD08Backup.svd C" starts overwriting patches from bank C onwards, or if you want to be even more specific, you can even provide a full patch number, like "JDTools convert svd input.syx JD08Backup.svd B42" would not touch B11...B41 and only start overwriting patches from B42 onwards.

Let me know how this works for you.

Massive thanks for the work on this, should make my JD-08 more usable.

This is perfect! Thank you! Now i have to find my old jd800 sysex dumps in old cubase arrangements, on 3.5 disks. Quite a challenge in itself, but at least now i know i can import them into the jd800 vst!

It's too bad Roland didn't add the drum channel to the vst. Is that functionality in the Jd-08 i wonder?

No. They're both based on the same ZenCore implementation.

A couple more issues were found when converting from and to SVD (JD-08 format), which version 0.15 of JDTools fixes.

OMG Thats awesome!!!!
I'll try at the night.

Just to confirm, for example if i want to transfer 1 sound only to position C11. I can use a .bin file with 1 patch of the JD800 VST and then use the command
JDTools convert svd <.bin file> <JD08Backup.svd> <C11>

Almost... BIN files created with the JD-800 VST always contain 64 patches, but BIN files created with Zenology can have a variable number of patches, so you could either use the JD-800 VST sort of as a bank manager, or indeed create BIN files with individual patches in Zenology. Also, the angled brackets will have to be removed from that invocation, they are used in the manual to designate placeholders

Ok perfect! Thanks for clarify it . I use the JD-800 VST to get sounds . And i have a bunch of sounds so probably i'm gonna make a selection of 64 sounds and dump them in an empty bank of my JD-08 to start messing around :P

I did it and it worked perfectly!!!
I have to test all sounds but so far everything is ok (my previous sounds are intact and the new sounds are working perfectly)

are the JD-990 factory presets available in sysex format to try to convert them?

I'd be interested in that as well, if only to have a set of well-known patches to compare the conversion against.

Great there's a software tool like this.

I've bought the JD-08 and made some patches for it. But I've returned it again. Now I've bought a Roland JD-990, and I would like to load those JD-08 patches in it. So I've tried JDTools, but I must be doing something wrong.

For instance I don't see on the jdtools site where to download the jdtools.exe that's mentioned somewhere else. I only see Download Zip (jdtools-main.zip) at Code. So I donwloaded that. But there's no .exe in it.

I mostly understand the procedure, go to command prompt, go to the directory where jdtools is installed. Copy the JD08Backup file to the same directory. First convert the JD08Backup.svd to a JD-800 syx, and then convert it to JD-990. But when I insert JDTools convert syx JD08Backup.svd JD08Backup.syx it doesn't work (probably understandable because there's no .exe file). JDTools is not recognized.

Do I have to install other software first? Or maybe it only works on later Windows x64 versions? I'm on Windows 7 (x86). It would be nice to get it to work.

You'll find the executable file under the "Releases" section at the right side of the page.

Thanks a lot! It's working now.

Someone converted all to use in JD-990?

I have updated the download to contain also JD-990 versions of the patches. The conversions for the plugin have also been re-done with the latest version of JDTools, which adds all the setup tones as an additional BIN file (every key / tone is converted to an individual patch since the plugin can't do setups)

Edit: If you have a JD-990, it would be great if you could provide a SysEx dump of the internal default patches, as requested above.

How do you compare those, sound wise?
Just booted up my old JD-990 after a long time, and it still does really impresses me even though I also have a XV-5080 (and a couple JV/XP). The crispness, the filter, the effects, the tones are just wow. Especially with the Superluminal patchbank from Soundsauca.

Help yourself.
This is the INT bank.
The infamous Genesises patch is I-22.

And thanks for making JDTools and the MRAM cards.

Thanks, that already revealed a small issue in JDTools that I didn't spot with previous JD-990 banks

A new version of JDTools, v0.16, is now available at https://github.com/sagamusix/JDTools/releases

This mostly improves lossy JD-990 to JD-800 conversions by approximating missing waveforms and stuff like that, and also fixes a bug when converting to SVD.

Is there anyway to get this working on Apple Silicone Macs, i tried to do it myself but failed