Z3 coming out in 2014 at the earliest? Well I guess the best way to support the u-he family until then is to get the Dark Zebra?

Cheers

And Bazille when it comes out...

Diva is a nice THICK counter to Zebra too...though ZHZ adds similar juicy filters, I hear... I feel it pulling me into it's gravity well when ever I use the Demo.


Diiiivaaaaaa. *** falls***

+4

Feature request for Zebra 3: Being able to fully enjoy Zebra 2 presets in Zebra 3.

If Zebra 3 is not backward compatible with Zebra 2, there's no reason to call the new synth a Zebra, really, because then they will just be two completely different synths.

Well, if we make every single module backwards compatible then we can't improve on them that much. We have however collected some ideas in the last 10 years which make me say "Had I had that idea back then, I would have done things differently". So in any case we're doing a clean cut, we're changing too many things to maintain full compatibility.

An example:

In Zebra2 we have various ways to create a "user defined waveshape or envelope". There's Oscillator waveforms based on splines and on wavetables. There's spline-based MSEGs, wavetable-based ModMappers, yet different wavetables for user-defined LFO steps. Everything is different, needs a different editor and works/behaves differently.

Now we're throwing all of this out and replace it by one single system that does really comfortable spline or wavetable editing. It'll do full drag'n'drop between any section, import/analyse samples, save as wave/env preset and ahve an overall same look and feel, regardless if seen in Osc, MSEG, LFO or ModMapper.

It'll literally be impossible to make it 100% backwards compatible. The current osc splines are "odd" because they lack compensation for non-linear spacing between dots, whereas the MSEGs have this. That was a performance-oriented decision back then, it's unnecessary today. Yet, Z2's osc splines can not be represented in the new style, even though teh new style is going to be more flexible.

However:

Zebra2 will stick around. And we might add a non-editable compatibility mode to Zebra3 which will still play Z2-presets for convenience, but doesn't let you edit other than XYs.

- Urs

To me this alone is worth it to break patch compatibility. As you said you'll be supporting Z2 for a long time so we get the best of both worlds.

(cant wait for more Z3 info!)

Ah-HA! Insights!

Very interesting description indeed, I'm glad you are still pursuing modern control tool design in Zebra. Indeed the fact you will have to change to improve is expected... backwards compatibility is exactly why Microsoft software sucks the big one.

Also, Importing and analyzing samples would be quite a thrill to look forward to.

Zebra 3....nah change the name...rename to Zeedonk or something...go more radical...do the new stuff and do a good upgrade offer...it will be better in the long run

Urs, this is something I've been dreaming of for a while. Will it be possible to process incoming signals with these spline/wavetables? Like waveshaping transfer functions?
If you can use the oscillators as a circular buffer for delays and realtime sampling, I may have to come to Berlin to hug you. Even if you don't I'll probably still need to do that one day.

hahaha, that's bit too far off for me right now.

We do have some stuff in the making that I believe you'll really like.

You know me... I really like everything you guys do.

Building a "compatibility" mode by embedding the old Z2 engine inside Z3, letting us use favorite old presets (that we like & don't want to edit) in the Z3 carriage? Pure genius. Everyone gets what they want without too much developer overhead (except for the Z3 part of the equation )

Yes... I'm just afraid that if we do that, some people would really, really like to edit those sounds... for which they would then have to fire up Z2...

otoh, rudimentary import may be possible... it just won't sound exactly the same...

Urs, you can't make everybody happy. I think for the average user, having a clean cut is the easiest to understand.
Just make sure each Z3 customer receives a free Z2 in case they want to purchase any Z2 presets. This will still be fair to upgraders since they will end up having paid less for Z2+update than new customers for Z3.

Around here, you will probably hear the opinions of many sound designers. So maybe give them a rudimentary preset conversion feature so they can 'update' their content more easily. Either relatively hidden or even as a separate build target. I think the pros can cope, for average users, it's just goung to be confusing if the presets don't sound exactly the same.

I'm saying this as an average customer, of course