u-he

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Thu Dec 09, 2004 7:34 pm

Yeah, I know a whole lotta people with faulty Apples. Must be something to it.

Mine runs fine, and I can't imagine anything that suits me better.

Cheers,

Urs

wrench45us · Post by **wrench45us** » Thu Dec 09, 2004 7:38 pm

last time i checked in there was no such thing as filterscape and I was told to be patient about zebra for pc

now I have to be patient about filterscape for PC as well?

i have more than enough synths so that most new shiny things don't interest me that much, except for what's going on here.

could someone provide me a 25 word or less summary of where things are at and how this filterscape got into the picture

Beardedone · Post by **Beardedone** » Thu Dec 09, 2004 7:40 pm

Thank Goodnees URS. I'm glad because your plugins top the list in quality. I have heard Zebra on a friend's MAC and can only say WOW! It is a beauty.

Here's hoping us PC users can get our hands on them soon.

Cheers

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Thu Dec 09, 2004 8:08 pm

wrench45us wrote:last time i checked in there was no such thing as filterscape and I was told to be patient about zebra for pc

now I have to be patient about filterscape for PC as well?

i have more than enough synths so that most new shiny things don't interest me that much, except for what's going on here.

could someone provide me a 25 word or less summary of where things are at and how this filterscape got into the picture

Valid question!

Zebra seems to be hard to port, so I've started to rewrite the engine back in July, to - as I think everybody agreed - take Zebra to Version 2, which would be Win as well. Now the engine evolved, it's portable, it's quite bug free, I have partners for the pc technology side (who are also very busy at times), and it's almost far enough to let me build Z2 upon it.

Unfortunately, like everybody in a business, I also have to earn money, because as you can guess, I counted on Zebra Windows revenues which actually didn't happen (and Zebra Mac revenues were pretty low over the past 3 months, as expected).

So I found it valid, if not existential, to actually test the engine with a couple of things that I know something about - hence don't need a great effort in R & D - and that will find some application in Zebra 2 anyway, that way building a plugin first that is not as complex as Zebra, and that I planned to do anyway, and that I could release just inbetween, in order to survive.

That's more than 25 words, okay, but I hope you understand the situation, and that Filterscape, Zebra and PC ports are linked to each other.

Well, and, honestly, it was a great fun to make this plugin

Cheers,

Urs

warbug · Post by **warbug** » Thu Dec 09, 2004 11:35 pm

with that being said any window for a release date? keep up the good werk tho i want it to be as good as possible for PCs becuase this is going to be my flagship synth not z3ta+ not sytrus not wusikstation not albino

wrench45us · Post by **wrench45us** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 12:52 am

thanks for the update
very much looking forward to the PC port

the idea of a powerful multi-function fx is great

and I still use my (registered) copy of mfm. I love that thing.

now i'm going to go listen to the demos and work on my patience

Sargon · Post by **Sargon** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 6:45 am

Urs wrote: That's quite simple (hopefully):

Thank you for the explanation. I will have a look at the patches you mentioned.

Sargon · Post by **Sargon** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 6:51 am

Beardedone wrote:Now that's not PC!

Right; it's a Mac.

Beardedone wrote:If you get a Carillon Audio Systems PC maybe you might want to ditch your Mac!

If there is any way to achieve to run OS X on these thingies, than I may overlook how ugly they are...

Beardedone · Post by **Beardedone** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 11:52 am

Love the diversity.

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 12:59 pm

warbug wrote:with that being said any window for a release date? keep up the good werk tho i want it to be as good as possible for PCs becuase this is going to be my flagship synth not z3ta+ not sytrus not wusikstation not albino

Zebra will be your flagship, no question

But honestly, I don't want to speculate about dates. Once I had the engine at the point to make a prototype plugin, it went *very* fast. I'm pretty confident that it will go *very* fast again, once I'm at the point.

I will not talk publicly about the engine, but I can assure you that many, many developers would die for having this. I've demonstrated a basic synthesizer in Stuttgart to the Dudettes (including Vurt, Jens, Glassback, Mysthar, Big Karma, Gadgetman, R'saM - sorry to whom I might have left out...), and I'm pretty sure that they know what I'm talking about when I say that most of the time invested was about speeding up development. In fact, I had an Emagic developer staring at my 2 monitors in pure disbelief.

The drawback of a new engine is, it not only takes time to develop, it also takes a lot of time to test in the wild. Filterscape looks pretty promising (not as many bugs as I was afraid of), so I think that part can be filed under success.

I'm now going to evaluate the synth side of things. This is basically finished, but not yet tested in the wild. Hence I'll connect a couple of oscillators to the rest of Filterscape (yeah, it's as easy as it sounds), and pass Filterscape VA (= Virtual Analog) over to the beta testers, maybe in a week or so.

By the end of the year, I want to have all of this going:

- a tested platform
- virtually all dsp modules required for Zebra (1) working in the new engine
- the engine interfaced to VST, but still using Mac graphics

In January, the VST side of things should be fully tested, and I'll interface the engine to Win graphics, which is the critical point. All I know is, it should be damn easy, but I have no experience on pc which makes it a little vague for me. Well, rewriting 2 medium sized cpp files for WinAPIs shouldn't be too hard. All it needs to do is loading and displaying scalable pngs, drawing boxes, lines, triangles and text, and opening hierarchical contextual menus plus 2 input windows. This has taken me 5 hours on the Mac, it might take a week or so until I waded through this on Windows.

The next thing would be spicing up modules for Rev 2 and a first beta of Zebra 2. Just like Filterscape is previewed now, this will be pretty easily accessible to you for beta testing, with the GroupBuyers getting it first.

You can now estimate that this will happen early in January. But as I estimated the first public appearance of what has become Filterscape to happen in October, I wouldn't bet a cent on my esitimates

(and my schedule is already corrupted, as I spend several hours a day on the forums and on emails currently...)

Cheers,

Urs

spaceman · Post by **spaceman** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 1:16 pm

great update Urs..

all the best with the developing
I hope it doesn't give you any grey hairs

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 1:35 pm

spaceman wrote:I hope it doesn't give you any grey hairs

Actually, it does. And not just 2 or 3 a day

Urs

Beardedone · Post by **Beardedone** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 1:37 pm

Great news Urs. Patience is a Virtue. And with programming skills like yours we can't lose.

Best,
Gordon

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 1:46 pm

Beardedone wrote:programming skills like your

Don't say this loud. Some gurus at Apple were kind enough to debug Filterscape and pointed me to the most embarrassing bug (The Mother Of All Bugs) that not even a true newbee will be forgiven. My good reputation at their audio devision will be lost forever...

Urs

Beardedone · Post by **Beardedone** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 2:24 pm

I'm sure you're not the only one. It took a team to find it right? Bugs happen to everyone.

u-he

KVR Audio

Zebra PC blog