Zebralette 3 Public Beta 2 Revision 17567

[aMUSEd]

OMG. I mean, I was impressed with earlier versions of Zebralette 3, its stunning smoothness for what it does, the amazing editing possibilities and all that. But THIS?! I'm so stunned right now. I'm normally not a preset-surfer, but this has to be the most beautiful, most inspiring array of presets I've ever encountered in any synth. Honestly. I haven't been excited like that about a synth alone by its sounds in a very, very long time. But then playing this... I write a lot here, but I'm actually kind of speechless. It feels like synth-heaven. Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!

Congratulations already, honestly. It's been so long since a real revelation appeared among synths. Not some fancy novelty, but a real, deep beauty.

Okay, the moment I will start with properly designing sounds with it, I may say some other things, haha, one never knows, but for now: U-Heck yes!

Absolutely! - again, amazing this is just one OSC of Zebra 3. -and free

[Fannon]

Great progress!, from half of the presets playable in beta1, to 90%!!!. Are you testing arpeggiation/real world (4-5note) chord transitions on your minspec? that's where I see the outliers.
High cpu usage per track is fine (<3 render/freeze), but exceeding the 100% core usage mark nets dropouts and I can no longer record a performance with live monitoring.

some patches that I'm often unable to transition between chords, or arpeggiate with live buffer sizes:

blue string theory (150% core usage and dropouts on second chord or arps)
click music box (125% core and dropouts on second chord or arps)
slapped glass (130% core and dropouts on second chord or arps)
thin strat (140% core and dropouts on second chord or arps)
Thumbira (110% barely there. arpeggiations drop out sometimes in fast passages)
Church in Space (140% core and dropouts on second chord or arps)
reproid 2 lime 105%

Is there any way to selectively do voice stealing/unison reduction/harmonic reduction/temporal resolution reduction for quiet or old voices when core usage nears dropout? I don't know if the daw even gives this feedback - maybe some playing heuristics or frequency masking aware resolution?

3600x 4.3ghz, REAPER 7 128@48khz (just under 10ms rtt) for reference, I can do 96 concurrent voices of pianoteq8 on a single logical core (48khz internal resolution).

What CPU do you have? I tested the presets you mentioned and noticed a few things:

I have an AMD Ryzen 5950X, 256 samples 48khz, Bitwig + CLAP. None of the presets overload the CPU, but those that use the additive renderer clearly use up more.

I noticed something unexpected: If I play "Church in Space" preset slowly, adding one note after the other, the CPU usage stays lower. But if I play all the notes at the same time stacatto, CPU is almost twice as high. Probably its high as long as the MSEG is modulating, once it stays at the peak, CPU reduces? See screenshot.

2025-04-05 22_28_28-Zebralette3 _ V Supermassive.png

Changing "maths" from precise to rough did not change anything noticeably on my machine on any preset I tried. Reducing resolution helps a lot in wavetable mode, in additive renderer mode not so much (reducing harmonics helps here somewhat).

What seems really good is that the presets do not cause any CPU / buffer use "peaks", they seem very predictable.

[Nug Wrangler]

Great news! Thanks Urs and team

[joradn]

For those on macOS, I have a suspicion that some of my crashes were related to permission issues. After granting myself full access with the command "sudo chown -R USERNAMEGOESHERE /Library/Audio" (chown changes ownership of the folder, maybe not recommended for shared devices) in terminal, I haven't had any crashes from the new Zebralette 3 beta. I'm not sure why I didn't have ownership, it may have happened after updating to sequoia 15.4.

[Taron]

For those on macOS, I have a suspicion that some of my crashes were related to permission issues. After granting myself full access with the command "sudo chown -R USERNAMEGOESHERE /Library/Audio" (chown changes ownership of the folder, maybe not recommended for shared devices) in terminal, I haven't had any crashes from the new Zebralette 3 beta. I'm not sure why I didn't have ownership, it may have happened after updating to sequoia 15.4.

I'm on macOS (Sonoma - Apple Silicon) and haven't had any troubles. Still have to update to Sequoia...
Thanks, though!

[aMUSEd]

For those on macOS, I have a suspicion that some of my crashes were related to permission issues. After granting myself full access with the command "sudo chown -R USERNAMEGOESHERE /Library/Audio" (chown changes ownership of the folder, maybe not recommended for shared devices) in terminal, I haven't had any crashes from the new Zebralette 3 beta. I'm not sure why I didn't have ownership, it may have happened after updating to sequoia 15.4.

I'm on macOS (Sonoma - Apple Silicon) and haven't had any troubles. Still have to update to Sequoia...
Thanks, though!

No crashes here on Sequoia and I have been using it extensively

[Esgalachoir]

It's mind-blowing! I'm in love all over again. I can't believe how well it responds to hand-recorded automation. This thing is a treat, u-he.

[aMUSEd]

If anyone wants more hands-on control here is a NKS version (just a control template - probably no point in saving presets yet as it is still evolving)

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/kqi76h54 ... wg3xt&dl=0

and here is a Bitwig Device panel for the CLAP version

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ardi8uc9 ... h3zjb&dl=0

[Urs]

Talking about that, any chance to have MIDI Lean for the next/previous preset button ? Could be useful !

That's been on our radar for a long time. I think we will do this, just can't say when.

[Nug Wrangler]

The CPU load is much better now, good work

[tasmaniandevil]

I guess you already know about this issue, but should I send the Zebralette3.log directly to support?

Yes, please send the log to our support.
This is one of those mysterious issues we cannot reproduce yet. So we need as much info as we can get.
Zebralette works fine in Cubase over here, so there must be some strange condition leading to this for a few users.

[tasmaniandevil]

I'm not sure why I didn't have ownership, it may have happened after updating to sequoia 15.4.

The system taking ownership of some user folders sometimes happens during OS updates, or when migrating files to a new Mac.
Our installers try to fix wrong or missing permissions.
But macOS won't allow the installer to fix it if the system accidentally took ownership of a user folder.
In such cases the user needs to manually correct that.

[firebolt41]

At this point it makes sense not to cut corners in the preset design or preset selection. If people experience problems, then their feedback is more valuable than if we pre-emptively made things look better than they are, e.g. by dropping CPU intensive presets or making compromises to bring CPU down.
It'd be great to verify if the Curve Math parameter has any effect for you on the playability of those presets, for better or worse.

I understand! Curve math makes a limited (5-15%) difference. Not enough to avoid dropouts - maybe an extra voice? The issues on my machine seem less to do with modulation, than pure voice load ( release times, chords, unison) --- Granted, my machine isn't the most recent hardware - but it's single thread performance is still relevant in relation to a lot of common cpu's in the laptop space, that are power or thermally constrained.
(IE: with my current clocks, it's neck and neck with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H in my lenovo, on a single thread.)

[ChanceB]

I just noticed this. Very nice,I love the the dark skin. Thanks Urs

[Funky40]

+1
Thanks Urs and Team !

Such a fun to play with Zebralette3. Such a good sound !