4500 Styles Cash-Grab Scam, Do Avoid!!
Bought 40 EUR worth of user styles for Roland GW-8.
The description promise 4500 styles for the GW-8 sorted by genre.
However, the description leaves out crucial facts about what you get here, because it doesnt mention anything about, that the styles are ripped off other keyboards, not only other Rolands, but different brands as well and then (poorly) converted to go in the GW-8.
Problems with the styles are:
- Track volume settings are messed up, meaning the volume is unbalanced and the reason is because these styles were made for other keyboards and hence, the volume settings needs adjustment.
- Wrong tones has been set here and there, like on some styles, the drumtrack will have a "piano" tone selected instead of drums while other tracks like the basstrack has a guitar or some other tone selected.
- All program changes has been converted to fit the GM model (not even GM2), meaning that the styles doesnt take advantage of the keyboards builtin tone library and render MFX settings useless as MFX cant be applied for tones from the GM/GM2 library.
- The styles hasnt been tested, theyve left that up to the customers to do and when a customer complains about the poor quality and lack of information (like I did), they respond that its the customers own problem to deal with and that they dont do refunds.
Obviously what has been done here is, that 4500 styles has been ripped from other keyboards, then mass edited with software like StyleWorks, which will read styles from a range of keyboards and let you export them in the format that suits your own keyboard.
To save time, they simply took those styles, degraded them to fit the GM standard and them mass exported them in different formats so theyd be useable on different keyboard models from different manufactures.
The whole thing is nothing but a cash-grab scam, falsely advertised as if it is a product made specifically for the GW-8, while the sad truth is, that its just a poor GM conversion of otherwise good quality styles.
Wohnraumakustik simply skipped all the hard parts of the job, like the testphase, the most important phase in any development process and they didnt review even review the styles prior to converting them.
So even though one can argue that you get a lot of quantity for the buck here, you also get weeks of hard work reviewing, sorting, editing and testing, the four parts that Wohnraumakustik didnt do, before you actually end up with something descent.