Zebra PC blog

[beej]

Here's a little thing I was playing with, just to show off some presets.
All naked Zebra apart from the drums (Stylus RMX) - no effects, compression or EQ, and a really rough mix.

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/bh6 ... zeetwo.mp3
(4.5 meg, 192 mp3)

This uses about 10 instances of Zebra, and uses only presets (actually, all are my "Beejay" presets bar one )

Did it in Logic and then moved it to Live for a quick arrange, then bounced.

(This was done on little earbud earphones so the mix won't be great, might be bass heavy too.)

[OMU]

Listening now...
This is cool, beej
Cheers.

[kodama]

Hi Urs.

Just to let you know - the white-lines-bug in the gui still exists in v0.7 (using Minihost).

Cheers.

I get some white lines around some controls in Live 5 as well.

[wrench45us]

a case where Zebra and the new presets fit right in to what I was doing
may not be to everyone's taste, but wanted to post something in appreciation of Urs and the beta communities efforts


pads:
2 instances of Zebra
biomechanoid (I think)

rhythm:
2 instances of Absynth
1 Clevinger and one biomechanoid preset

and that's it

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/songInf ... ID=3440339

[Urs]

Hey Wrench, that's cool - IDM meets Fripp!

Urs

[wrench45us]

glad you enjoyed it Urs

I installed the new 2.02 update
maybe I just didn't pay attention before, but I'm getting a lot of really high cpu presets as high as 50%. I haven't seen these numbers with a soft synth for a long time.
Am I the only one who may be seeing a difference between 2.07 and 2.02? I'm going to reinstall from scratch.

[aer72]

I downloaded the latest version of this cool synth, but I don´t see the new presets in the browser.
I can load one 'fxp' at the time. Is this the way to do it?
Cheers

Nevermind... figured it out.

[Urs]

Long time no update, but I have a couple of minutes before going to beer, so here are a few bits:

Z2 now has a global Swing parameter. That's kinda weird thing, because it swinggrooves any time based modulation. You can select from various note lengths (i.e. 1/8, 1/4, 3/1, whatever) which lets the modulation tempo slow down and rise up as if being modulated by an lfo. Groovy.

I had a weird day with the GUI stuff. I benchmarked the time to open the GUI on my machine and it was close to 4 seconds. No wonder with all the stuff in there. However, I improved the script parser and now it's only 1.7 seconds for the first instance and 1.4 seconds for any further instance. The script is now the fastest part of the game. The slowest part is loading all those png graphics and scanning the preset directory. The script engine itself works roughly 8 times faster now

I'm also evaluating some commercial performance libraries for the pc version, because the performance on pcs isn't as good as I thought it'd be. However, I see only little difference in there, even more drawbacks. I might consider some SSE3/EMT64 stuff later this year. Unfortunately most of the slow parts are all 64 bit precision, which work great on G5s and comparably weak on x86. But IIRC normal SSE/SSE2 won't help me here. At least I could speed it up for MacTels and PC with recent processors then...

There's also a new and faster concept now to prevent Z2 from processing more than needed, i.e. filters after silent oscillators. The old way had some problems when detecting silence, which could lead to cpu spikes by denormalization. I think I'll implement the new stuff asap and it should definately solve any problem here.

Still no MacBook Pro around. Thus I havn't bothered with Universal Binaries nor with VST 2.4. Waiting a bit for latter might be a good move as there seem to be updates popping up every now and then.

I've postponed GUI skins until summer or so. That stuff seems a bit too much to do right now.

Oh, yeah, there's the arpeggiator now. Looks pretty much like the one in FilterscapeVA but it has 2 step modulators. One can do some weird stuff with that.

Well, another thing is, I've tested a mode that removes any smoothing to prevent annoying clicks on new notes. This can indeed lead to more punchy sounds. I'll add a switch for this, like the transient parameter in Z1.5.

Okay. Need a beer now. More later.

Cheers,

Urs

[gbles]

Cool. Looking forward to the next release.

[VitaminD]

I wish to sum up what urs just mentioned..

he said ~'Z2 > great' and you must believe him.

[Urs]

WOOOOOT!!!!









Urs

[rsmus7]

[wrench45us]

auch, it's in German

und

Alle Rechten vorbehalten

[kodama]

I've postponed GUI skins until summer or so. That stuff seems a bit too much to do right now.

Awwwww - no Z1 style Flat Skin?

Oh, yeah, there's the arpeggiator now

[Urs]

I've postponed GUI skins until summer or so. That stuff seems a bit too much to do right now.

Awwwww - no Z1 style Flat Skin?

Depends. I think the MacTel transition might be smoother than expected. That was one of my biggest concerns. Thus I might be able to start earlier on skin support.

However, I want to finish that software. Main thing left is handling of special files, such as .tun or Module Presets.

The recent work concerns very low level functionality of my stuff. That means, a bug in there can have pretty wide effect on the whole thing. The beta team had quite an impression of this last week, when suddenly a small feature addition resulted into totally corrupted presets. Thus everything advances very slowly, so I'd like to postpone stuff that's not absolutely necessary for a final release until V2.1 or so. I mean, I also have to update 11 more plugins for MacTel and stuff...

Btw. the MacTel transition might be cool for the Win versions as well. I'm tempted to write some SSE code

Later,

Urs