This is the price with VAT for European customers (without the $50 dinosaur discount). So it's the regular price for Zebra in Europe. The price will be shown on the last page when ordering (share-it)

I have re-read and no you didn't.

Yes, and that's the point! Arguments like yours that are based upon cherry picked data are weak arguments.

[quote="digitalboytn"]

And sound quality ?

I think no soft synth sounds better than the virus that is why people buy it.
It has that unique virus sound.

I personally wouldn't hesitate even a picosecond to get a Virus TI2 if I had the cash. Soundwise and presetwise it is top of the notch. Nuff said. But until I got the cash then I'm still using Zebra / Omnisphere / z3ta+ / Nexus that I've already bought, know how to program to get the sounds I want, and love to use.

Freeware I'd say that ZynAddSubFx gets the best Virusish sound.

ZynAddSubFx is the best abandoned VST evah.
Don't forget the poor, buggy Klangformer - oh what could have been...

To answer the OPs question I find the likes of V-station although nothing fancy, still excellent for bread and butter bass and lead sounds.

Ultra analog/sylenth1 for a bit more than bread and butter bass, leads, background chords.

Massive is great for doing more experemental dubstep/drum and bass digital bit crushed f**ked up crazy sounds.

Pads, warm bassy trance chord plucks, 'liquid like' sounds with lots of filter movement, will be done by the virus as i've not came accross a soft synth that handles these things as well..

ah I was looking at this page http://www.u-he.com/cms/zebra2-patch-banks I didn't even see the one you posted anywhere on the site.


However, I already addressed the others in a response above. But I'll address it again.. even if you take into account the 5 dollar bank and the 11 dollar one and the 16 dollar one along with the others not on that page the average is still within the spread I stated initially. Of course I'm not going to admit I'm wrong - because I'm not in this situation!

You're basing your argument against mine on a handful of dirt cheap banks.. when I'm looking at the overall.. the average. I never stated ALL. And you can't point out one or two and say 'they are ALL cheap' you have to look at the bigger picture. the average. As I have been this whole time. My position has never swayed. I'm afraid I can't help you if you aren't willing to accept this.

Besides much of those cheap banks aren't within the range of genre specific which was in my initial statements.. and how many commercial artists are releasing Zebra banks in the genre in which they produce?

Access Music has a purposely built community side to their products.. that includes releasing these genre defined banks periodically.. it is part of their business model. They do a good job at it imo.. I seems as if it is one of the ways they address the initial cost of their synths! You get something that is supposed to just work. Similar to Apple's scheme.

I was bored so I had a closer look at the figures.

The average price for all the Zebra banks listed at the patchlib is $32.7

By far the most common price is $30, with 7 banks at that price (and 3 banks at $39, 2 at $20 and 2 at $24).

Two thirds of the banks lie in the range from $19 to $40. Plot the prices as a frequency distribution and there is an obvious bunching of prices centred around $30. The three banks above $60 look like statistical outliers.

So it would seem reasonable to call $20 to $40 the common or usual price range, which would mean that Zebra would need to cost $80 for VitaminD's calculation to work. But it doesn't - it costs nearly twice that.

Also, looking at the prices for these Virus banks there seems to be a very similar range and frequency distribution, with $30 being the most common bank price and a few expensive banks above the $50 mark.

There really is very little in any comparison between Virus and Zebra bank prices.

You keep mentioning 80 dollars. where are you getting that?

If we even use your numbers, 25% of $150 (which is what Zebra cost) is $37.50. That is in your own range of $20-$40.

About the Virus banks.. you are making part of my argument in your last post. We can even accept your false price of $80 for Zebra vs the soundbank price and that point I'm making still holds firm. I don't know what else to say to help you understand. I truly don't.

Because, more importantly, it appears my main points are being missed.. the same ones that I keep making.. and you keep countering by avoiding them and picking the parts that you want to address. Which is entirely different from what I'm getting at. So this is going no where.. I don't believe you'll ever see what I'm saying. Perhaps it is partly my fault.. maybe I'm not 'verbalizing' them fully.. or perhaps you just don't want to agree.

I get the feeling you have a chip on your shoulder and you simply want to be disagreeable with me.

This more or less describes me though it was a while ago and the TI2 didn't exist yet, so it was a C and only Zebra and Sylenth were available at the time. Since then I added some analogs and I have to admit none of the software including Diva is totally there yet but it's still useful. Click a button and you've got a Minimoog osc section and a Jupiter filter? Not a trick done in hardware, that's for sure.

Still, a Virus doesn't eat CPU cycles like Diva does, but on the other hand, you could buy a new computer for the price of one. Great instrument, but probably doomed to extinction like most VA hardware.

Boring Maths debate alert!!! Going on far too long and hijacking the thread...FFS LET IT GO Guys! It really doesn't matter that much.

I wonder where they will go with it. TI3? Additional DSP.. How many more oscillators, filters, effects, etc does one need?

I think the Snow is based off of the original TI with one processor. So about half the power of a desktop TI. Then there is TI2 with even more power but the same feature set.

They seem to be running out of ideas on how to sculpt this product. Or are at least milking every drop out of it slowly.. I wonder what is the game plan..


Then again, We are still using recreations of hardware synths made 2 and 3 decades ago. hmm.. one day it will be retro.

roger that, loud and clear.

And, what do you think will replace hardware VAs? Are musicians who demand quality instruments all going to devolve into "producers" who sit on their fat asses making music with a mouse. Or, are companies all going to see the light and realize that VAs suck and all go back to making analog synths? Something else?



Amen, brother. But wait, what if we calculated the harmonic mean of the number of presets per unit cost???