Zebra PC blog

[fritzman]

Let's put it this way: I've got a lot of stuff buried in my drawer. My paranoia tells me that I should open it.


Merry Christmas,

Urs

YES!!! Make me want that thingy sooooo badly that I give in to buy -another- synth.


Merry christmas, FRitz

[fritzman]

http://www.u-he.com/music/BioScramble.mp3



Urs

Oh, really nice! Very guitarish synth sounding. Cool!


Merry christmas, FRitz

[Urs]

I wouldn't worry too much about what the competition is doing. Sure you gotta keep an eye on other products, but you're doing pretty good from the feedback you are getting. We know you want to blow everyone away, but sooner or later the product has to get out there - if you wait forever until it's got everything we'll never see it!

Hah, no, I'm not as worried as my post might suggest. I know this pretty well, because some outstanding filter plugins appeared shortly after Filterscape came out and this didn't harm sales in any way. Quite the opposite was the case. Somehow everybody was talking about filter plugins which I think made a "must have" out of a niche type of effect category.

However, I found it funny to make myself believe that the sudden culmination of releases were somehow connected to Z2 rather than the holiday season

So, don't take it too serious

There's nothing holding me back from a final release when the originally planned feature set is implemented. There's also nothing that will stop me from releasing 2.x updates (free updates, that is) every now and then with nice modules added

Btw. my biggest fear regarding final release has vanished: The user manual is almost complete. It will initially only be an online manual, based on blogging software. This turns even the manual into a modular environment that can successively be extended by new stuff and tutorial pages. However, I think it can be exported to pdf as well. We'll see...

Cheers,

Urs

[beej]

That's a nice idea - it would be cool to be able to add user comments to manual entries in the way that a lot of developer documentation is done - then people can post queries over particular functions, tricks and tips for using them etc...

And prospective buyers can see this stuff and see there is an active user base too...

[drez]

That would really be awesome to be able to render comments into a pdf for a manual that was built online!

(BTW, I wasn't a zebra owner in the past, bought filterscape, and now am using the preview of Zebra and I'd have to say this is the most leathal combination of plugins in my folder. Can't wait for the release. Excellent work urs!)

[pd]

Let's put it this way: I've got a lot of stuff buried in my drawer. My paranoia tells me that I should open it.


Merry Christmas,

Urs

I would keep the draw closed. Put out a little special something every month or so to keep everyone talking about it and then we can all come out and brag about the great new thing we got and how Zebra 2 is the best new synth out this year!!

Zebra2 is saving me money because I'm finding it easy to pass up on all the new synths coming out. There is so much to explore with Z2 and so little time.

Happy Holidays to all and I hope you all find some time to play with the Zebra.

[Urs]

Hehe, thanks pd!

Well, as you might all know, I'm not into that kind of marketing like moving a knob 2 pixels to the left, call it an update and harvest more news. I think the frequent update policy might be good for new sales and hype refreshment, but on the other hand it might as well piss customers who get fed up by downloading a new version every other week. The only frequent news I'm gonna try to gather is new preset libraries. So, it'll more be like updates every couple of months rather than every couple of years (as it is now... ). Which of course is one of the reasons for the length of this thread. And the reason for rewriting everything from scratch. Extensibility. Once Z2 is out, my development cycles will go down dramatically. One must not forget that the improvements to the engine (such as scriptable presets, gui resizability or better MidiLearn) will also be available for Filterscape and MFM2, just after a recompile

Damn, there's such a shitload of things to come. Hehehe.

Cheers,

Urs

[Muff Wiggler]

MFM2

[Urs]

MFM2

Yeah, didn't you know that Zebra's Reverb, Chorus, Delay and Combs are basically built from the guts of MFM2? I thought it was obvious...

Urs

[Hengy]

yay .. MFM2

[scuzzphut]

I think I'm going to cry

Fantastic stuff, Urs Don't let the paranoia get to you. As long as you are at the vanguard of all that is good in vsti development, you will not need to pinch other people's ideas and you will be able to sleep at night.

[shamann]

I don't think you have to worry much about the other synths. Some are excellent, but I haven't really seen anything new that truly competes with Z2. I doubt anyone would say "well I was going to get Z2, but now I'm getting FF Twin instead." I just don't think they compete for the same buyers, and the overlap would most likely be either people who want both, or opt for Z2 since it sounds great and can do so much more.

I agree 100% with your extensibility strategy. I always find it peculiar that so few developers think that way.

I'm not much of a synth guy these days, which is why I registered MFM instead of getting Z2, but if I were buying a new synth, Z2 is the only one I'd get out of the new crop.

[OMU]

Just load it with 1000 great sounding presets and everybody will want it just to have those sounds.
MHO.

[shamann]

I wanted to add, Urs, I don't think you are entirely wrong. Several synths did seem to hit market out of nowhere. I'm sure Christmas was the biggest factor, but I wouldn't be surprised if one or two decided they wanted to get the jump Z2.

[YBaCuO]

I agree about the 1000+ great presets. Maybe it is unfortunate that so many don't have the time/desire to program presets, but that's the facts for most ...

YBaCuO