Zebralette 3 Public Beta 2 Revision 17567

[tasmaniandevil]

Hi everyone,

time flies when you're busy. And busy we have been.
While we are mainly working on getting Zebra 3 ready for prime time, we didn't forget its little sibling.

Zebralette 3 now comes in light and dark flavours:


Isn't it gorgeous?

A note on the road ahead: right now we are focusing on getting Zebra 3 feature-complete before switching back to bug-fixing mode. This means that while we fixed a big load of bugs in Zebralette, we still have quite some way to go.
Please check the known issues section below to get an overview of the quirks you might encounter.

We fixed many of the reported crashes, but there have also been crashes we couldn't reliably reproduce. Thus, we need you to help us catch the remaining cases. If you encounter crashes with this new beta, please report them either here or contact our support. Ideally, keep a folder named u-he-log on your Desktop, then zip it directly after experiencing a crash (or any other issue).

If you created presets with the first beta, they might need some adjustments, as the envelope times have been extended.
Parameter automation might break in existing projects, as quite a few parameters have been added to the automation list.

Speaking of presets, the factory library is shaping up nicely, thanks to Viktor and Howard.
Definitely check out the included sounds. They're stunning, if you ask me.

If you are on Windows or Linux, it's best to manually delete the previous factory library before installing the update, to prevent a mix-up of old and new presets.

Grab the beta here:

Zebralette 3 public beta 17567 Mac
Zebralette 3 public beta 17567 Windows
Zebralette 3 public beta 17567 Linux

Changelog (most important changes since the first beta 15573):

Improvements:

* Dark mode skin added
* CPU load improved
* Many more presets added
* Osc FX order can be swapped
* Curve maths parameter added
* Curve morph position now indicated in GUI
* Added option to switch off waveform plot
* Showcase smart folder added to preset browser
* ADSR times improved
* Lots of tiny details

Fixed:

* Fixed: MSEG guide 1 was displaying loop points
* Fixed: applying SinOMatic could change morph transition type
* Fixed: Spectral Decay sound-difference between curve and guide
* Fixed: key control navigation could get stuck in timeline
* Fixed: crashes when switching between certain presets
* Fixed: crash when opening or closing GUI with multiple instances loaded
* Fixed: crash switching from additive to wavetable renderer
* Fixed: MSEG could display multiple loop end points
* Fixed: issue in DeltaX and Scrambler Osc FX
* Fixed: some CurveToGuide options did not work
* Fixed: Simplify function wasn't simplifying enough
* Fixed: crash when using the copy function in the editor
* Fixed: trigger based Osc FX were not working in additive render mode
* Fixed: MSEG velocity wasn't working
* Fixed: memory leak eating RAM for breakfast
* Improved copy and paste behaviour in editor
* many more fixes

Known Issues:

* More automation parameters have been added; automation in old projects might break
* Random crashes when loading the plugin, closing/opening the GUI or loading presets
* Mod matrix: slew modifier can kill the preset
* Various glitches in the curve editor
* MSEG single trigger mode doesn't work reliably yet
* PreListen quirk in additive mode
* Twinkles FX: high frequency twinkles can sound noisy
* Digital Noise can cause short glitches (Windows only)
* CLAP parameter modulation not per voice yet
* Linux: preset context menu missing favourite and junk icons

Enjoy,
the u-he crew

[Fannon]

Wow looks and sounds great! Congrats for the next beta release.
Now I need to find some time to play through the new preset library, already found some very nice sounds!

MPE support is not yet in, right?

[tasmaniandevil]

MPE support is not yet in, right?

Not yet.

[jtsterays]

CPU is definitely way lower than the previous beta, but still quite high on some patches, I'm not sure if that's due to Zebralette not fully optimized, or if it's just the nature of Zebralette's complexity. Kind of worrying because this is only 1 osc, with Z3 in the future some patches could be unusable for me (W10, FL Studio, 5800x). That said though I'm still happy for a new beta, I think it will be stable enough to use in serious projects, and it's my birthday today too, really nice timing.

[Urs]

Happy Birthday!

In regards to CPU usage, I just published a little video here:




The settings should make a big difference. If you come across CPU hungry presets where they don't change a thing, we might start a new topic to collect and discuss those observations.

However, a second round of optimisations might happen in autumn where we might be able to squeeze some more juice out of various oscillator effects (and also add support for AVX2 etc.). Note that, if I had showed a "normal" patch with a "normal" oscillator effect, CPU usage would be less than 1% even at most precise settings. So our observation may differ from others, just like some particular AMD processors had really bad performance with Diva and Repro, where we were also able to fix this eventually.

[Daru925]

Cool! cant wait to test it!

[carlosigls]

In Cubase 14 it does not work, in Reaper it does.

[tasmaniandevil]

In Cubase 14 it does not work, in Reaper it does.

It's not a general incompatibility with Cubase, as it works in Cubase on all our test systems.
Please contact our support, maybe we can figure this out together: https://u-he.com/support/#contact

[jtsterays]

Happy Birthday!

In regards to CPU usage, I just published a little video here:




The settings should make a big difference. If you come across CPU hungry presets where they don't change a thing, we might start a new topic to collect and discuss those observations.

However, a second round of optimisations might happen in autumn where we might be able to squeeze some more juice out of various oscillator effects (and also add support for AVX2 etc.). Note that, if I had showed a "normal" patch with a "normal" oscillator effect, CPU usage would be less than 1% even at most precise settings. So our observation may differ from others, just like some particular AMD processors had really bad performance with Diva and Repro, where we were also able to fix this eventually.

Thank you. I did found a preset where the settings don't change anything (Click Music Box). I locked the voices down to 4, then played a 4 notes chord for consistency, CPU was around 23%. Also was just testing a raw saw init patch (same voices setting, chord), here's the numbers :
2khz = ~16%
800hz = ~7%
200hz = 3%
- Maths setting didn't change anything with the saw patch, at 200hz the CPU is the same as Hive, same patch.

[Urs]

I did found a preset where the settings don't change anything (Click Music Box).

Click Music Box uses Guides for Spectral Decay. Those don't morph (just crossfade) and thus can be pre-calculated. Because of pre-calculation, Curve Math have little effect. The Curve Math setting is mainly important when morphing curves, which is what used to cost 25% or more for a single voice on some systems, and thus is the worst case.

Also, hehehe, I guess I should have mentioned this, the Additive Renderer always runs at a pretty high resolution. That's probably why Resolution does not do much in this preset. Adding Resolution to the Additive Renderer is part of our autumn development schedule, along with other CPU optimisations...

[jtsterays]

I did found a preset where the settings don't change anything (Click Music Box).

Click Music Box uses Guides for Spectral Decay. Those don't morph (just crossfade) and thus can be pre-calculated. Because of pre-calculation, Curve Math have little effect. The Curve Math setting is mainly important when morphing curves, which is what used to cost 25% or more for a single voice on some systems, and thus is the worst case.

Also, hehehe, I guess I should have mentioned this, the Additive Renderer always runs at a pretty high resolution. That's probably why Resolution does not do much in this preset. Adding Resolution to the Additive Renderer is part of our autumn development schedule, along with other CPU optimisations...

I see. Do you have a preset where the maths setting have noticable change? I've been testing some poly patches and the CPU difference between precise and rough is really minimal.

[Urs]

I guess very few presets exhibit the worst case

So, "Quire 2 - low" is an example where setting Curve Math to "Fast" gave me about 25% less CPU than "Precise".

That's not quite the same gains as what I showed in the video, but it's also not nothing either.

So I checked out your CPU and I think a Ryzen 7 at 3.8GHz should probably give you a similar performance per voice as my 3.2GHz Xeon. We have the mobile version of your CPU here, I'll check against that.

Update: Ah, I didn't read that this is for 4 voices. I think that's fine, it matches our measurements. You'll experience better performance once we add AVX2 support.

[Chris Jones]

In Cubase 14 it does not work, in Reaper it does.

It's not a general incompatibility with Cubase, as it works in Cubase on all our test systems.
Please contact our support, maybe we can figure this out together: https://u-he.com/support/#contact

That looks like the same issue I posted here a while back. It went away after a Cubase update (13.0.30), but then resurfaced after a subsequent update (13.0.51 or so) and still remains.

[jtsterays]

I guess very few presets exhibit the worst case

So, "Quire 2 - low" is an example where setting Curve Math to "Fast" gave me about 25% less CPU than "Precise".

That's not quite the same gains as what I showed in the video, but it's also not nothing either.

So I checked out your CPU and I think a Ryzen 7 at 3.8GHz should probably give you a similar performance per voice as my 3.2GHz Xeon. We have the mobile version of your CPU here, I'll check against that.

Around 2-3% difference between precise and rough for me. "Lemon Flange" is a bit better (4-5%). Some of these patches are really beautiful by the way, I'm trying to learn these presets but not being able to bypass the osc FXs makes it a bit hard, hope you will add that in the future.

[Urs]

Yes, OscFX On/Off is planned, but didn't make it into this version.

Our development focus is making Zebra 3 feature complete so we can start designing factory presets. We will attend to details like OscFX Bypass, MPE, optimization etc. - all of which have no direct effect on sound - once sound design has taken off.