Zebra 3 Public Beta Revision 20399

[PieBerger]

I say let's have both bigger arrows and further UI/UX improvements, but also people should read and or explore more instead of expecting developers to make it intuitive dumb everything down for them.

I'd like to see UI improvements to the manual itself. The logo menu lets us open the manual, and then we read the table of contents to look for sections relevant to what we're doing. What about jumping directly to those sections from the module they're relevant to?

I'm into it

[mkohlgraf]

I just ordered. Very excited!!!

[thopd]

Congrats on the release, I've been enjoying Zebra 3, here is my feedback:

- So far, Zebra 3 is running surprisingly well on my 10 year old MacBook Pro. CPU consumption is acceptable for my workflow (one instance at a time, low number of voices) but further optimisation would of course be welcome.

- Unlike in Zebra 2, the microtune menu doesn't show subfolders (yet?), so at the moment you can't organise your tuning files, which is troublesome if you have a lot.

- As someone else has mentioned, I'd love to have a "Replace" option when right-clicking on a module in the main grid. This would save one step. Selecting this option could bring up the module palette on the right.

- The visualisation of the modulation depth seems inconsistent. For example, when modulating both feedback and dry/wet on the texture reverb, the green ring around the feedback knob disappears immediately while the one around dry/wet stays. The latter is gone too when reopening the saved patch.

- On my display, a UI size of 90 percent is too big while at 80 percent the font becomes hard to read. An option to adjust the UI size in smaller steps would be great.

- I use Zebrify 2 all the time, so I'll add another vote for Zebrify 3 or audio input with an envelope follower. A frequency shifter would be nice too.

- Unrelated to Zebra 3 itself, the u-he checkout page automatically calculates the price in my local currency but adds a hefty 15 percent. I checked and this happens with several currencies. Unfortunately, I trusted u-he blindly with the conversion and already paid 20 euro too much when I bought Zebra Legacy. According to customer support, it's possible to avoid these fees by selecting euro as currency, so I don't understand why u-he isn't doing that by default.

[M32]

Seems like there's more bugs when importing Zebralette patches, the preset loadingsystem gets all wonky and sometimes it doesn't load other presets after that or keeps parts, like mod routings and fx. Unloading and reloading the plugin does fix that.

[M32]

Pitch page: if i assign modwheel or pressure to one of the pitch lanes' vibrato depth, it affects all oscs regardless of what pitch lane they are assigned to.

Perhaps it's not clear in the user guide: To prevent e.g. vibrato from Pitch 1 being adopted by Pitch 2, the Pitch 2/Vibrato section needs to be activated.

i understand, but even then this happens. That's the bug

[vrobot]

Is there a way to disable the automatic mouse-wheel-scrolling-changes-values?
This makes impossible Z3 to navigate with the MBP trackpad (so many accidental changes!).

thanks

By the number of requests we get from this, I guess we should make a preference to restrict scrolling to scrollbars or something.

Strangely, this never was an issue in Zebra 2. Maybe there is a bug.

Hi,

First, Zebra 3 = AMAZING. Thank you.

The scroll wheel was an issue for me in Zebra 2 with a normal mouse, drove me crackers on a number of occasions.
An option to disable parameter changes with the mouse wheel would be much appreciated.
Or perhaps parameters can be changed only when holding a modifier key down + mouse wheel.

Thanks Urs, you legend!

[brownerthanu]

I seem to remember there oscillator shape presets in Zebra 2, but I can find them in Zebra 3.

[Urs]

Congrats on the release, I've been enjoying Zebra 3, here is my feedback:

Thank you!

- So far, Zebra 3 is running surprisingly well on my 10 year old MacBook Pro. CPU consumption is acceptable for my workflow (one instance at a time, low number of voices) but further optimisation would of course be welcome.

We'll try... some areas have potential, others not so much.

- Unlike in Zebra 2, the microtune menu doesn't show subfolders (yet?), so at the moment you can't organise your tuning files, which is troublesome if you have a lot.

That's certainly gonna come!

The UI is so complex, we kept those things simple to be able to keep up...

- As someone else has mentioned, I'd love to have a "Replace" option when right-clicking on a module in the main grid. This would save one step. Selecting this option could bring up the module palette on the right.

So you'd right-click and "Replace", then the module dispenser appears... hmmm, yeah, that might work.

- The visualisation of the modulation depth seems inconsistent. For example, when modulating both feedback and dry/wet on the texture reverb, the green ring around the feedback knob disappears immediately while the one around dry/wet stays. The latter is gone too when reopening the saved patch.

We'll try to improve this, but it may have to happen later...

- On my display, a UI size of 90 percent is too big while at 80 percent the font becomes hard to read. An option to adjust the UI size in smaller steps would be great.

We'll try to get a bit wider and make 90% fit.

Finer steps is a larger project, it might happen as part of another UI project we have next year.

- I use Zebrify 2 all the time, so I'll add another vote for Zebrify 3 or audio input with an envelope follower. A frequency shifter would be nice too.

The ringmodulator in Z3 is also a frequency shifter. Pretty crazy module.

- Unrelated to Zebra 3 itself, the u-he checkout page automatically calculates the price in my local currency but adds a hefty 15 percent. I checked and this happens with several currencies. Unfortunately, I trusted u-he blindly with the conversion and already paid 20 euro too much when I bought Zebra Legacy. According to customer support, it's possible to avoid these fees by selecting euro as currency, so I don't understand why u-he isn't doing that by default.

Ugh, sorry

So we recently (well, a year ago) switched to a new merchant for our shop. It's very new to us that they add so much on top for currencies other than Euro, USD, GBP and CAD, we only just learned about this a few days ago. Strangely hadn't been noticed before, or maybe it just also wasn't the case.

I thought we had resolved the problem, but apparently that is still in the works.

I'm sorry this happened, I do not know at this point of we can preset currencies or any of it.

[NAD]

Here's a sound I've been trying to do for ages with various synths. I got pretty close with Z2 but I think I pretty much nailed it this time!

CZ-101 ELEC.ORGAN.zip

I don't have any Casio CZ synths to compare it to so I had to rely on the Arturia emulation (which as far as I can tell is reasonably accurate).

[Urs]

Hahaha, I have a CZ-1000 - this sounds familiar

[thopd]

- I use Zebrify 2 all the time, so I'll add another vote for Zebrify 3 or audio input with an envelope follower. A frequency shifter would be nice too.

The ringmodulator in Z3 is also a frequency shifter. Pretty crazy module.

I admit I haven't explored the ringmod yet. My bad! So many modules, so little time...

- Unrelated to Zebra 3 itself, the u-he checkout page automatically calculates the price in my local currency but adds a hefty 15 percent. I checked and this happens with several currencies. Unfortunately, I trusted u-he blindly with the conversion and already paid 20 euro too much when I bought Zebra Legacy. According to customer support, it's possible to avoid these fees by selecting euro as currency, so I don't understand why u-he isn't doing that by default.

Ugh, sorry

So we recently (well, a year ago) switched to a new merchant for our shop. It's very new to us that they add so much on top for currencies other than Euro, USD, GBP and CAD, we only just learned about this a few days ago. Strangely hadn't been noticed before, or maybe it just also wasn't the case.

I thought we had resolved the problem, but apparently that is still in the works.

I'm sorry this happened, I do not know at this point of we can preset currencies or any of it.

Thanks. I'm a big fan of u-he, but my finances aren't great so realising that I was charged 20 euro extra when I bought Zebra Legacy in August left a bit of a bad aftertaste. I don't know how many customers you have in countries like Japan or China, where the pre-order page for Zebra 3 charges the equivalent of up to 210 euro. But I can't imagine that these inflated prices are helping. At any rate I'm glad you addressed this, now I feel a bit better about ordering Zebra 3!

[snigelx]

I do have a tiny suggestion. I absolutely love the new FMO module, especially after it's dev explained to me in Berlin. It's a very clever design. But from the tutorials I've seen some of the guys are struggling with understanding the modulation flow inside the module. <snip>

Maybe people making tutorials should read the manual first, before attempting to educate/demonstrate to, others . In case some of them find their way here, it's p51 under the Feedback header.

(who wouldn't want to digest the delicate chocolate dessert of Howie's cooking guides? ever treasure troves of great tips the internets can't touch)

[Esgalachoir]

I have a suggestion that might be a bit involved, but it would be really cool to be able to split an additive oscillator stereo-wise, the way the new EQ's work. For example, you could do partial mode, where all(or cleverly selected?) partials are pitch offset with a binary knob.

The Additive Renderer uses a pretty extreme amount of CPU. It uses very little CPU compared to some competing products with a similar density of oscillators, but we decided (for now) to keep it monophonic.

You can kind of try this with the Modal Resonator. While the partials there are transient, you can stereo detune them. To be honest, we almost threw this function out, but maybe that is because detuning partials in transients seems to be merely a stereo positioning effect than a widening effect.

However, the Exciter's stereo options show how the Modal Resonator can sound pretty wide - without any detune. So we're thinking maybe we experiment with the Additive Renderer not with stereo detune but with stereo positioning, with similar control as Spectral Distortion. We just don't really know where to put all these damn controls, and where to find the time to do it.

Maybe for a V3.1 or a V3.2

I finally got around to really digging into the modal resonators last night, and they are lovely.

Yeah, avoiding doubling up the additive oscillator is understandable. My new system is pretty beefy and still must bend the knee.
What you alluded to about stereo spreading the partials that are already in the engine versus doubling them up sounds easier on everyone and everything.
To elaborate on your approach, fwiw: It would be neat to have a partial stereo spreader that is based on the guides or curves. Seems like the most reasonable and efficient idea to me(but I only know enough coding to know that I don't know much)
If one wanted to really cut corners, I wonder if it would be even easier to just weight the stereo spread by partial frequency(low partials approach mono, with the main fundamental being completely mono, or vice versa.)
As for waiting for literally ANY other version of what's already here, I cannot complain. The candy shop is still decadently full, imo.

[enCiphered]

What is the proper way to reset an MSEG, or any modulator back to its default configuration?

[Urs]

What is the proper way to reset an MSEG, or any modulator back to its default configuration?

In Hive we have made init presets for each module. I'm sure we'll do the same here, too.