"I didn't quite get the gist of your post, but let me chime in on some of the subjects...
In my world, loyalty discounts are a tool to turn a disadvantage into money." ~ Urs
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To clarify:
It's someone else who may have expressed an interest in 'loyalty discounts' (and/or that kind of thing), not I.
I am uninterested in loyalty discounts and the like since I have no loyalty with your company. So the part of your response that elaborates on that is of little relevance, at least to me, although it may be to others of course.
If I have any 'loyalty', it is of a general gift-economics position, including such concepts in our little context here as peer-to-peer, file-sharing, and FLOSS (Free/Libre/OpenSouce Software). That's real 'long-game ROI', since you mention it.
You do have freeware, but the code is ostensibly still proprietary.
BTW, did you name your 'Civilization' hardware as inspiration from my quasi-joking with you roughly a couple of years ago about getting into acoustic guitars for after civ's decline/collapse? Europe doesn't seem to be doing very well these days, but then, neither does most anywhere else.
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"I don't think that we're the only company to do public betas." ~ Urs
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Yes, I seem to recall Madrona Labs going that route with Sumu for example.
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"For instance, had we not done a free to use beta, many people would have bought Zebra 3 already based on certain expectations, e.g. that it would load wavetables, that it did resynthesis, all of which it doesn't, and this thread and the feedback hopefully helps to clarify these things during the initial hype. I think we help people understand what Zebra 3 *is*, and what it *is not*. Which is more valuable for us in the long run than selling more licenses now, to more people who then turn out to be unhappy." ~ Urs
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Sure I get that in its own context.
WRT the import/resynthesis, however, are you saying that all sounds/waveforms are to be made from scratch? Did Z2 not have some kind of import app called Blueberry and/or whatever?
Madrona Labs, for its Sumu additive synth, has, if understood correctly, a modified version of an open source program they call Vutu (maybe renamed to that) that resynthesizes and then outputs to the native Sumu file format that it can then read in. Can Z3 not manage that or something similar? Where are you getting your code for the physical modeling part? Is it open source? Apparently, SurgeXT incorporates Mutable Instruments.
