Roland VS 880 Expanded CF 

I did the same thing with an 840. It enables recording on all tracks and output through the wav converter. The company that made the cards was local so I bought an extra one 😊 I’m actually going to pull it out and use it as a sampler for my volca synths and other components.

Awesome, thanks for doing this and showing us how you hooked the CF. So cool!

wow John this sounds amazing!!

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥like that conversion! Brilliant! Great idea‼️

My father gave me his a few days again truly iconic

I still have had mine from 1997. Still works great.

These were great little bedroom recording boxes. I recorded a bunch of songs on one in the early 2000s onto Zip disks. The main unit felt very solid, although I recall the faders and rotary encoders felt a little bit cheaply constructed. The transport buttons were pretty nice to press though.

Nice mix! I still have two VS 880 ex's , one I bought new and the other was given to me. I released my CD Road of Dreams in 2009 and to this day I'm proud of the work we did on these machines. I never actually ran into a problem not having enough room and that's strange, given that today I use Pro Tools and I use up so much memory. These VS machines had a lot of great features and the guitar modeling in mine was way ahead of it's time. I would like to do a conversion like you have done.

nice!!!! sounds lovely

I like the way you pan the camera slowly, it is so annoying when other video makers swing from left to right, up down sideways so fast, it makes me nauseous. Thanks for that good work.

lovely track

Hi John. Thanks for the video. Could you tell me what that little black adapter is that the IDE adapter plugs into? I don't have one of those as my 880 didn't come with an internal drive. Cheers. Scott

Nice song dude.real crusey

Sound good

Wow! The acoustic guitar recording sounds amazing. Did you use compression from the VS-880? What all did you use to record the guitar?

Nice video

thank you buddy!

How did you get your tracks to sound so amazing!

I was wondering what exact cf 4gb card are you using ? two of mine wont work i used a sand disk 2gb and it just idle's with the led and saying setup ide and then i bought a Kingston 4gb and it does the same .I got the same adapter you have as well.

Dear John, I have open up my Vs880. It never had an internal drive so the piece you used in your cast doesn't appear to be present. What I have is the VS880 connector board with slot CN 601 and CN600. If you could offer some assistance it would be much appreciated. Kindest regards Emerson.

thank you for the fast reply could you tell me where you bought that CF reader so I could get one to the exact model and everything for your 1880 I have had trouble with my hard drive crashing a few times and it would be nice to have this as an alternative

Just curious as to how you got it cleaned up so well. The knobs and levers are so clean. Any recommendations how to clean it up nicely?

Hi John, 4 years later, I am trying to convert my 880ex to the CF card but after the recorder boots, it says there is no drive, yet if I conect the CF card and adapter to my pc via a sata adapter too, it works perfectly, so the flash and the ide adapter are good. Have you any idea what may be missing from the process of adapation? Regards from England.

Today found one being thrown out on the street picked it up all seems to be working but it asks for 500 mb or 1000mb cant recoerd or anything its because i need memory? or have to plug it into something else?

Sounds great. I bought a VS-880 Expanded in about '98 and had great hopes for it. My engineering and tech skills are/were pretty non-existent and I hope the tech in the VS-880 would take care of everything. I struggled with it for a few years off and on, without the patience needed to learn how to use it properly and I could never get a guitar tone that sounded half good so i would give up each time until finally in 2003, the hard drive just crashed. I eventually replaced it and got an external drive with big chunky disks I would put in. By this time everyone was using PC based stuff. I still have the VS-880, because, despite my failures, I still thought the actual quality of the sound was nice. I am wondering whether or not I should keep it so I checked out your vid. Thx. Sounds great btw

Love your demo on the Roland VS880. The VS880 is a marvelous, simple, and user-friendly way to record. Can you help me? My Roland has frozen up with an error message that flashes, NoDrv. Don't want to lose the 60 songs stored in my VS880 by replacing the hard drive. It's been suggested that I CLEAN the hard drive. Do you do repairs? I'm in the Dallas TX area. Doc

Hi , how do you sync stereo outputs to multi tracks to load into pro tools? I have an 840 and trying to dump one track at a time is laboring. Thanks

Hello John, i just bought this machine with 4GB CC card and it shows me only 20m of remaining time. Im not sure if this card is full, have no way to check it since i dont have CC reader. So i just wanted to ask you if there is any possibility to format card on this machine or do i have to do it on PC. Thanks for answer and all the best in 2021.

Hi John, I own a S 880 EX and would like to ask you, whether it could be possible to "upgrade" my workstation to a card reader or bigger internal hard drive. Can you help me? yours KURT from Bavaria

hi sir.,.,can i use that adapter with my roland vs840ex

Hi John. Could you tell me the specs of the CF-reader? I'd love to try this but cannot find such a device anywhere (here in the Netherlands)

So after taking my VS 880 apart and trying to put in my CF card reader with a 4G CF card I only found a computer ribbon cable that will not allow me to connect to anything inside the device, you must be using some sort of special adapter to connect the CF card reader cause it's literally impossible to connect the 2 together.

I tried this with an SD to IDE adapter, but it will not save from session to session. I keep getting a prompt to initialize the drive each time the 880 starts up before it will allow me to get to the recording settings. Is this the case with the Compact Flash card, or does it behave like the HDD?

Please share how to record on to tracks 7 and 8 I own one and can't seem to record to those tracks thanks

Hey guys. Better you go for a sd adapter. Way more cheap and easier to find. Just saying.... Instructional video somewhere here on yt....

awesome man that is really cool will it work on a vs 1824 machine? I remember my mother-in-law bought my first 880 and it was also $2,500 LOL

It has only balanced input. So do I have to use a DI box to go in with mic like sm57 or can I go in directly? Hope someone can answer. Cheers

On this i recorded more then 2000 song In my audio studio

Is that live drum on track? Sounds very good.

can the same thing be done with the roland vs 840?

Hi can you gave me info where I can buy such cf card reader on internet for my vs880ex. I would be great full. Hof it's not a problem. Maybe can You help me. I cheers.

Still have it and use it?

same with me I bought an adapter and it just keeps wanting to reinitialize everytime I turn it on still no answer about this

Hi, I'm not sure why, but your link isn't working. Do have another link or way to direct me there? Thanks

i just installed it and it records but when i shut down and restart it re ininitializes and throws out my work got an answer any body