U-he Zebra 3 (Alpha)

[Ah_Dziz]

Awesome! Thanks for the info. Is there a max frequency for the mod system in Z3? There generally is but it's nice to know it. I can't wait to get my hands on zebra 3. Z2 is my go-to synth for almost everything these days.

Unrelated to this, is zebrify 3 going to be released alongside z3? Zebrify 2 is still my favorite "non fully modular" synth for processing audio.

[Urs]

Awesome! Thanks for the info. Is there a max frequency for the mod system in Z3? There generally is but it's nice to know it. I can't wait to get my hands on zebra 3. Z2 is my go-to synth for almost everything these days.

Trigger inputs are usually direct modulation sources, so they run at 1/4 sample rate. But they do use hysteresis and need a little down time before they trigger again, say about a millisecond.

(using an MSEG I've brought the Exciter for the modal synthesis well into audio territory)

Unrelated to this, is zebrify 3 going to be released alongside z3? Zebrify 2 is still my favorite "non fully modular" synth for processing audio.

We won't have a Zebrify FX version, but we do have high hopes that we'll manage to add audio input at some points. It isn't done yet, and it may take until. subsequent update, but getting rid of VST2 as the greatest common denominator opens up the possibility to safely assume that an instrument can have audio inputs.

[Ah_Dziz]

I will very very happily beta any audio in capabilities you add in the future. I'd love to be able to use extracted envelopes from random audio to trigger very specific envelope shapes in zebra.

Great to know exactly how the control to audio rates are set up. Can't imagine it would be an issue for the very large majority of uses of most synths. Again can't wait to try the betas out. Keep up the good work.

Having heard so much about the new uhbik release, I'll check it out again.

[Ah_Dziz]

Please keep the pitch and transient trackers as well as the envelope followers whe you do get into the audio in stuff.

[Urs]

Please keep the pitch and transient trackers as well as the envelope followers whe you do get into the audio in stuff.

That is one of the things where we need to figure out how to do it. There'll probably be envelope followers, and much like the Uhbik one it'll be able to trigger or gate stuff.

The pitch thing is a more complex issue. I haven't a clue right now how to integrate it with how the voices use pitch. I guess some things need to wait until we have time to breathe.

[sunthief01]

Pumped at all the good news and technical details with this right around the corner. Its exciting that Zebra 3 will have ways that it is intended to grow over time

[sheeepsss]

Thanks for the answers, much appreciated! Can't wait to play this synth!

[Fannon]

But we will most likely have a version of Zebra 3 out in the wild between end of November to mid December.

Our main concern right now, apart from presets, bugs and fine tuning is CPU performance. If Diva says "I'll smoke your CPU", Zebra 3 will say "Hold my beer!".

Good that I somewhat recently upgraded my CPU, I think it will handle it!

Question: Is Zebra 3 startup fast like all the other u-he plugins? That's something that I really appreciate somehow, how fast a u-he synth loads.

Having Audio in would be really awesome. Is there a baseline performance use? If I would route audio-in, disable all the OSCs and just enable an FX + some modulation, I assume CPU usage should be quite limited (similar to a good FX plugin)?

[Urs]

So the UI currently opens with more lag than our other plug-ins, maybe a second or so? That is probably because the UI script is several megabytes long. I haven't really profiled this yet, but either way, if it's the script, the image loader or the vector drawing, I'm sure there are ways to speed things up. As I write and try this on my 2024 MacBook Pro, UI feels like it opens instantly in Reaper.

As for the plug-in itself, I'm sure it loads pretty instantly, but admittedly I haven't paid much attention to this (debug builds load very slow while the debugger hooks itself up, so I'm used to very bad lags...)

Preset Browsing is a tad more laggy than, say, Zebra2. Same problem obviously, larger file size due to Oscs and MSEGs. I have an idea for that, but haven't done it yet. Not sure when I find the time or if I can task someone else with it, it's one of those things I think I can tackle quickly while another developer might have to study some 20 years old code for a good while. It just never seems to reach priority status. Once people complain it'll climb up on the list.

The worst thing probably is UI performance on Win and Linux. While I think we have greatly improved rendering, we still use our own software renderer. This was always faster on Windows than on Macs as long as we had mainly bitmap based UIs. But as we have to move to vector UIs, hardware acceleration has become faster. So on Macs the UI is very smooth, on Win some of the scrolling and transitions feel a bit laggy. Next year we'll probably start a major refactoring project on Win and see if we can tap into something. So this will improve over time, but we can't possibly delay the release for this.

[markp]

Hi, is there a release date for this vst?
I purchased my copy of Zebra 2 when I was 26 and they were already talking about Zebra 3: this December I'll be 40 and I started to have white hair. My dog wasn't even born in 2012 and now she's 11 and she also has white fur. How much do we have to wait for this synth to be released?

Urs is one of the Ent, tree herders of the forest.

[Funky40]

@Urs,
your feedback vs. Zebra3 is much appreciated !


But your sidelines are invaluable for somebody like me -who has no stake nor any insights into coding and SW development-. It makes "*my" Internet just richer.
Thanks for that !


......can´t wait

[ffx]

Where is it where is it where it!?

[scott_free]

This is definitely the most excited I've been for the release of a plugin.

[martinjuenke]

Urs is one of the Ent, tree herders of the forest.

You should reduce your smoking.

[DrGonzo]

If Diva says "I'll smoke your CPU", Zebra 3 will say "Hold my beer!".

Why does this make my heart sing?