Zebra 3 and Zebra Legacy

[petedako]

Thanks Urs … sincerly bringing tears if joy to my eyes playing Zebra again these days and right now …still so breathtakingly beautiful… perhaps even better than ever with the more powerful CPUs and modern hardware and controllers… Natürlich BitWig and all the mindblowing uhe instruments in between… A.C.E. offenbar…and the Bazilla Monster ( wasn't there another virtual-cable modular one I'm forgetting? and Diva (!) …HIVE so cool to see the rest of the world catching up and I'm very happy to pop back in at KVR after a long time away seeing what I missed — totally stoked for a CLever Audio Plug -in version DIVA and/or whatever comes next

Onward and upward

[termux]

i wish they stop doing partnership promotions with Bitwig from now on.

The last promotion they had recently with Bitwig was just uncomfortable for me to watch and felt like something was going on.

Like Bitwig just had summer sale, crossgrade sale, and now all of a sudden a U-He promo. Why such a large amount of aggressive promotions in such a short time?

Today, it all came clear why...

I hope U-He dissociates themselves with Bitiwg and continue to remain impartial as one of the best devs out there. Otherwise, I'll have another big batch of plugins to sell.

Hello my friend found your comment here Do you receive my comment notification? for some reason I can't send you private mail.

Thank you for telling me this forum. This forum is super active and quite "toxic" lol

[FakeNatty]

Hello my friend found your comment here Do you receive my comment notification? for some reason I can't send you private mail.

Thank you for telling me this forum. This forum is super active and quite "toxic" lol

Yes, I can see it.

I just posted on buy and sell forum too. I think you need to post like 5 comments and wait 2 weeks to send PMs. It's just to prevent spam accounts. Yea, toxicity fills the air quite fast when there are a lot of people around

[Sound Author]

Wait, now I'm super curious about which of the modules is "a bit dodgy"

[Shiek927]

Somewhere on a white-board at u-he headquarters is "NO DODGY MODULES"

[TENETfanboy]

I also want to know which one he’s referring to

[Alexander_D]

Hope that as Urs promised the owners of Zebra 2 and Dark Zebra will have Zebra 3 for free!

[dayjob]

Hope that as Urs promised the owners of Zebra 2 and Dark Zebra will have Zebra 3 for free!

Yes. It’s been confirmed like 27 times in this and other threads.

[Urs]

Hehehe, yes.

In about two weeks we'll publish the magic date for Zebra Legacy (not Z3 though), and a table as to who gets what and why. Then everyone has about two weeks to make a final decision as to "I trust they'll come up with Z3 in the not-so-distant future and so I buy myself into that" or "Splendid, I'll get everything super cheap in a few days and I don't care about Z3".

[TENETfanboy]

Just to reiterate without having to go through the entire thread, will Zebra Legacy be a separate synth (basically ZebraHZ), or just a bundle with the current two?

[dayjob]

Just to reiterate without having to go through the entire thread, will Zebra Legacy be a separate synth (basically ZebraHZ), or just a bundle with the current two?

you don't have to go thru the entire thread. just read the first post.

Dear everyone,

It’s been almost ten years since I first responded to speculation about an imminent Zebra3 release. We now know that the envisaged time frame was overly optimistic, to put it mildly! We had just released The Dark Zebra and Diva, and little did I know the extent to which these events would transform the company from being just one guy plus two employees into what u-he is today. Instead of “a year or two, max” it took all of eight years and a global pandemic to finally have something sharable...

Actually, that’s not quite correct, as we spent a good chunk of that decade on product maintenance, and developed a lot of technologies needed for Z3. Here are a few examples of the “milestones” required for Zebra3 development:

• A library of curve manipulation tools (powers e.g. Hive’s Shape Sequencer)
• A multicore-enabled modulation matrix which can be used in multithreaded software. Already implemented in Repro and Hive.
• Wavetable import, manipulation and export like in Zebra2 and Hive, but taken to new levels. Work in progress!
• Filter modelling technologies which rival Diva in terms of “beef” but use significantly less CPU by sacrificing a tiny bit of authenticity: Filters don’t really need to sound 100% like this or that synth if they still sound GREAT. Good examples are already in Hive, Bazille and Repro.
• Novel comb filter and physical modelling technologies, some of which have been deployed in Colour Copy and Hive.

Countless other UI improvements and audio tweaks were necessary to reach our goals, but those were the main ones.

Even though a skeleton Zebra3 project already existed several years ago, none of those technologies have been built into a working example of Zebra3 yet. Our most ambitious goal was always the unification of Zebra’s visual curve editors instead of the 6 different editors for oscillator “Geo” curves, “Blend” waveforms, MSEG curves, ModMapper steps, LFO steps and Key/Velocity scalings. The main incentive of Zebra3 development is to have just one kind of editor for all of these jobs. The new editor needs to be comprehensive, fast and must be ‘professional’ in every way.

Today we have a usable, almost feature-complete prototype of this editor. It does what it’s supposed to and is every bit as good as we had hoped! It’s also as extensible as it gets, so I could probably spend another decade on it. However, we decided to show it off at the Superbooth event in Berlin as we want to let you make music with it ASAP.

A release of “Zebralette 3” (freeware Zebra 3 oscillator plus MSEG) as precursor to Zebra3 has become a possibility in the near future, so we need to communicate a few things that have changed since 2012. Hence this post!

Back in 2012 I pledged that the upgrade from regular Zebra2 to Zebra3 will be 30 bucks, but free for existing owners of The Dark Zebra. Of course we will honour that pledge, but in the meantime we have switched our pricing from USD to Euro. There is a cutoff date: Some time later this year - not sure when exactly - we will stop selling Zebra2 and The Dark Zebra as individual products (see the next paragraph). We will post a gentle reminder when the cutoff date is getting close. So...

To ensure that Zebra2 and The Dark Zebra continue to be maintained and kept up-to-date, we will bundle the two in a new product called “Zebra Legacy”. Everyone who has a license for Zebra2 will automatically have their license crossgraded to Zebra Legacy. Zebra Legacy will contain all our existing soundsets (including The Dark Zebra) for a very attractive price. However, there’s a catch: There will not be an upgrade path from Zebra Legacy to Zebra3 for anyone who buys it after this cutoff date. The upgrade conditions will only be available to those who have bought Zebra2 (and/or TDZ) before these become “Zebra Legacy”.

I know we can’t make things perfect for everyone, but I think that letting you know our plans way in advance should preempt any bad surprises. We think this scheme, while unusual, is best suited to secure the investment of our most loyal customers, and at the same time allows us to keep going.

Now for the part that is probably the one people are most interested in. What must happen for Zebra3 to be finished? Unfortunately of course, a lot! We think half a year or so until the editors, oscillators and MSEGs are ready. That’s several months before we can start beta testing Zebralette 3, make presets, sound demos and so on.

On the module front, everything else is a piece of cake in comparison. We have half a dozen more or less mature modules (LFOs, filters, FMOs, comb filters etc.) and plenty which “just need to be slapped together from existing parts”. On the UI front we lack a few controls and upgrades (e.g. things that exceed 32 layers). All things MPE, CLAP, NKS will happen in parallel anyway. In total it’s optimistic to say “at least a year”. We’ll be super happy if we can show some more technology previews at NAMM 23 or at the next Superbooth.

I think the message you can take away from this post is that there’s a strong commitment to getting this done. There’s a plan!

Cheers,

Urs & team

[ATS]

ETA on Zebra 3? I mean like 1st quarter of 2023? 4th Quarter?

[Urs]

ETA on Zebra 3? I mean like 1st quarter of 2023? 4th Quarter?

Can't say.

Due to circumstance I had to drop full time work on its centrepiece, the wave/envelope editor, a few months ago. Once I get back onto it, I reckon another 2-3 undisrupted months on this, then I can slowly start thinking about estimates for the rest of the project. Like, checking out what state other modules are in, some of which being 5+ years old, and evaluating if they're still good enough.

[snjegi]

In about two weeks we'll publish the magic date for Zebra Legacy (not Z3 though), and a table as to who gets what and why. Then everyone has about two weeks to make a final decision as to "I trust they'll come up with Z3 in the not-so-distant future and so I buy myself into that" or "Splendid, I'll get everything super cheap in a few days and I don't care about Z3".

I totally appreciate the open communication regarding this topic. It's certainly helpful and fair.

I'm still in a bit of a pickle right now. I don't own any of the u-he plug-ins yet except for Bazille. I'd love to get the full range at an affordable price and I'm hoping for some kind of bundle promotion in the next 2-3 months (maybe in collaboration with NI again or to celebrate CLAP support or whatever). Of course, u-he won't/can't communicate whether there's something coming up. And since the bundle would contain Zebra Legacy, it's unclear how much the upgrade to Z3 would be.

On the other hand, I'd like to take advantage of the generous Zebra 3 upgrade for Zebra 2 owners. Until the end of October I could use the 25% coupon from Bitwig to get Zebra 2 or maybe even more products at a reasonable price. Obviously, the more I buy now the more it devaluates any bundle for me (as already licensed products are usually not considered for the bundle price).

Any suggestions on what is the most promising approach? Buy Zebra 2 at a discount now and be save on the upgrade price for Zebra 3 or wait for a bundle promotion and risk getting no discount at all? Quit making music?

Best regards,
snjegi

[Urs]

And since the bundle would contain Zebra Legacy, it's unclear how much the upgrade to Z3 would be.

It would be the full price of Z3.

Zebra Legacy will be priced so insanely low that there won't be any margin left that could be redeemed towards Z3, or further discounted in any kind of special offer.

The cheapest way to get both Z2/ZL+Z3 is to buy Zebra2 within about the next three weeks, and wait for the 30€ upgrade to Z3. This however only works if you trust that we'll be able to deliver (we will, I have no plans to get run over by a truck). That's 229€.

If you wish to see what you get, I suggest to wait for Zebra Legacy and evaluate whether or not Zebra 3 will be worth its asking price. That's more than 100€ more in total, but it's safe if for whatever reason Z3 doesn't meet your expectations.