Zebra 3 - final beta Rev 21625 April 8th

[Eluwei]

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[johnnyberrygoode]

While there is time to fix something before the release, I'm trying to look for minor flaws in the visual interface. In the fmo module, the lines are slightly shifted to the right. Displayed on the picture.

[Fannon]

Congrats to the beta release!

I like the direction of the new theme, for my taste it could become even more minimalistic (less gradients).

My only gripe for now is that under Windows the UI still loads very slow (10s on a Ryzen 5950X) and in some places looks less sharp than it could be (curves look great, fonts less so). But I saw that Urs mentioned that they will work on Windows rendering / performance, so happy to hear that!

[Ameyah]

wow awesome, its been such a long wait!

[Howard]

Was just doing some more cursory intonation testing with MTS-ESP Suite/Master, and noticed with the default patch, I'm getting some acoustic beating effects when playing some primary intervals, such as just 5/4, 3/2 and even 2/1...

Did you check Pitches / Pitch 1 / Calibration? In the "init" preset the settings are Type = Uncalibrate, Amount = 20.00... Set that to zero.

[perox]

Uh, the CPU optimization is quite significant! In previous version I was hitting ASIO guard quite often with some more complex patches, now it rarely goes over 60%.

[sounjaerk]

new GUI is fab

[IanFu]

Thank you, thank you, thank you!! Hitting the download link now!!

I'll have a check once it's downloaded, but I'm not noticing any mention of anything related to a bug I posted so just in case it isn't solved, I'll drop it here.

viewtopic.php?p=9214039#p9214039

I'm still getting the same problem as above. An additional thing I've noticed:

If I set the Voice Alloc to Iterate and Discharging to Smooth is that the sound just turns to pure distortion almost immediately. Set to Continue, the distortion goes but I can still play polyphonically in Mono mode.

Switching off MPE and going to single channel mode doesn't change it although Mono does then work correctly.

This only appears to occur on rapidly played repeating arpeggios i:e playing C major as an arpeggio as fast as you can.

[Eluwei]

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[Lbdunequest]

After playing around with the synth and going thro presets. I truly believe this synth might be a 1 synth for analog emulation needs.

[Eluwei]

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[art&sound]

Better than the previous version in terms of colors, etc.

But I stand by the idea that having tabs for synthesis, pitches, and presets is a bad design choice.
- The Presets button should just be integrated into the preset window, since it, you know, opens presets. Other u-he products do this right. This one is doing something different and worse for no reason.
- Pitches should be a tab on the bottom left and live alongside the matrix. It's currently at the same hierarchy as selecting presets or actually using the synth, and it's not. It's actually a weird feature that I guess I'm supposed to use 33% of the time alongside presets and the synth itself.

One additional complaint: The targets you can drag from look like car rims or 4-spoke toxic symbols, and they differ from the icon that follows your mouse when you drag them out. I think by any standard, the icon you drag away should better match the one you dragged from.

[exmatproton]

- Pitches should be a tab on the bottom left and live alongside the matrix. It's currently at the same hierarchy as selecting presets or actually using the synth, and it's not. It's actually a weird feature that I guess I'm supposed to use 33% of the time alongside presets and the synth itself.

This is very subjective. I am glad they made it this prominent. I am using the pitches tab all the time. WAY, (way way way) more compared to the presets tab (which i 0,00000000001% of the time open)

[cvale]

I like the new UI look. Off the top of my head, here are a few things I think could be improved in various areas:

- I still wish that bipolar modulation ranges were reflected on destination parameters.

- This one is minor, but I'll mention it. It would be nice if you could drag a mod source directly to one of the nodes in the EQ. Currently if you try, it will automatically select point 1. You can then go into the Matrix and change the selection to a different point, but it's extra clicks that shouldn't really be necessary.

- Not wild about the fact that CC74 (or whatever you set for this) is tied to one of the Control knobs. Why not just make this a dedicated source? All my other MPE synths have something like Slide or Timbre as its own source.

- In terms of core functionality, I feel somewhat strongly that the current way that Guide morphing works is underwhelming because it's a crossfade and not point-for-point interpolated like the curves. An obvious example where the current implementation feels lacking is on the Formant oscillator effect. You can set up three formants and crossfade between them but it would be much more desirable to actually have formants that interpolated between one another. I recognize that the crossfading saves CPU and that having the Guides follow the same logic as Curves will complicate the Guide editing part of the oscillator editor. I see a couple ways around this: 1. allow selection of another oscillator's curve rather than only being able to use the curve of the current oscillator, 2. simply enforcing the same number of points for all Guides (so it automatically maps point 1 from Guide 1 to point 1 of Guide 2, etc.). The current situation is basically a result of the crucial design decision to have Guides do dual duties as editor tools to manipulate the curves AND serve an important role in the oscillator effects, which is probably the only design decision I would deign to question in Zebra 3. As it is, the crossfade simply doesn't produce results that feel that satisfying to me when used with most of the oscillator effects.

Anyway, overall I am excited about this update and appreciate all your hard work and feedback.

[Urs]

In terms of core functionality, I feel somewhat strongly that the current way that Guide morphing works is underwhelming because it's a crossfade and not point-for-point interpolated like the curves.

The point here is indeed that by just crossfading we can pre-calculate their values and do this at almost no CPU cost. It also saves us from adding a morph editor for guide curves, which would be a hard sell.

If you need morphing, you can already have it: You can always select the curve itself and dedicate a slice of the "timeline" for whatever duties you'd normally give the guides. Put curves from frames 0-70 for your waveform, and use 80-100 or so for your format filter.