Hello and congrats! I hope you like the sounds in this synth. Thank you for this hardware review, it's so interesting to have a dev/engineer point of view on this!
Roland is not a very kind user friendly firm, they try to become one, at product launch they usually make a lot of promises, but hardly follow up passed legal obligations... It's the same for all their products, they are never fully developed, because the only purpose of selling them is to make more money and income for the greedy shareholders of its board.
So that's very sad for the users, who all inevitably conceive mixed feelings about the brand Roland and their products : we quite necessarily have Roland gears in our sets, we hate the brand for what it is, and we end up disliking the particular aspects of their products they never developed or bug proofed properly...
They appeared to care about this in the recent years, because they nearly crushed during the 2008 recession, but new shareholders have taken it back to business as usual. Right now they are surfing the wave they tried to set as the "new cool Roland", and their effort is to turn to emerging markets to take the money where it is, this is why they design less ambitious and more affordable low quality mainstream products. But this wave will break as inevitably as the interest of these new markets, when they will too realize the brand is just a half ass, unable to deliver promises and very quick to abandon after sales product development when the money line is reached.
There doesn't seem to be a solution to this, unless you're ready to develop a tool to allow for converting custom samples into the SRX format. I see a first step to this, if you copy and rename one of the SRX on the SD card, can you see it on the Integra's interface, can you load it? If yes, it means more data could be loaded. Then, it would take to figure it out what how the samples are compressed in there. We know the architecture of the synth, all we would need is the format of the expansion data.
If you have the skills to investigate about this (I personally have none in this field, but maybe other users would?), maybe you could come up with a software solution to convert user samples into SRX expansion format. And then I'm certain many of us would be happy to even pay some to be able to use it, if you decided to make some with this work. In the past, various such third party software, or even hardware expansion boards, have been used in many synths, it wouldn't be unseen.
Anyway, the Roland development plan the way it is purely driven by the financial profit, despite all they can market to say they're cool and planing on the long term, is bound to crash and collapse in this world, because more and more people can actually make sense of technical data, and realize what a scam some of their so called premium or flagship devices are in reality : mean budget pieces of crap they don't even consider fit to fix or bring to their potential for the patient people who actually bought them with their hard earned money. The Integra-7 is kind of an exception to this list of half baked goods, it was designed at the worst time of the crisis to serve as a life jacket for a company that was drowning. That's why they put so much of their tech in it at the time. It worked, they sold many of them, and business went back as usual as they swapped their board entirely via a management buyout maneuver to trump bankruptcy.
Do you think they could have followed up and give this device a nice after sales life, as a symbol of their renaissance? Nope they certainly didn't, they let it down, as they always did.
The only exception to this let down/public disappointment policy, is when the marketers indicate there would be a surge in sales if a firmware would unleash the hardware potential of a device. Last time it happened was with the Boss (Roland) RC-505 looper, when they released a firmware 2 years after initial launch, multiplying by 6 the DSP treatment ability of the thing (...), and they only did it because the very narrow beatboxers community had found consensus to reject the product unless they did it right.
See, we will not see tomorrow an update to the Integra-7, it is now in the limbos at Roland, past and gone for good, and this is why you will as well conceive hate for this crooked entrepreneurship of theirs soon enough, as well as the rest of their users in the entire world...
