Zebra3 Info

[Urs]

^ I was going to post about that too. I'd really like to see those waves able to be loaded into zebra 3

Loading waveform files of some sort is one of the driving forces of the Zebra oscillator improvements.

While not important to sound I'd like a UI overhaul too. The Pokemod skins go some way in improving but I think could be even better.

A new design is in the works. We don't do the "big overviews" found in Pokemod and Redux but I think it's going to be very good nonetheless.

[chaostheory]

Great news on both fronts Urs

[bookworm]

Not so elaborate as some ideas but it would be good to have some way to save Arps and ArpMods in Zebra other than in the patches. Please.

[Cyoon]

Not so elaborate as some ideas but it would be good to have some way to save Arps and ArpMods in Zebra other than in the patches. Please.

considering that this is already possible with Hive now,i'm pretty sure it will also be possible in Z3.

[AnalogGuy1]

I´we seen many good suggestions on how Zebra 3 should be. But I would like it to be a hardware synth. Digital oscillators and (if possible) at least one analog filter. Pretty much as DSI pro 2, but polyphonic and real daw integration. Why not a big touchscreen to operate main windows and then adress whatever you want to hardware knobs, and XY.

Impossible - you say?

Not for Urs - I say.

Have €8000,- to spend I say?

Haha. A touch-screen does not cost much, and an analog filter is what makes it expensive, since the oscillators should be digital. It won't be cheap, but not near 8000 euros.

I think the difference would be NRE costs (Non-Reoccurring Engineering) costs to setup a hardware run. They can eat a small company alive. You can build a small run of analog boards yourself in your garage, but there's no way a human can hand-solder a multilayer DSP board, or DSP chips with pins separated by less than 1 mm. They have to be outsourced for automated pick-and-place robots and massive wave soldering stations, and outsourcers require large initial volumes (typically 3,000 units) to justify their setup and custom tooling. My guess is that Urs would need on the order of 400,000 EUR to do a first production run, assuming he had already invested the manpower in programming it. Then he'd need to invest in a structure to securely hold the inventory, handle shipping, handle customer service/repair...it's why you see small-business analog boxes (guitar pedals, parts of modular synths), but you don't see many 88-key digital synths from small manufacturers out there (or at least, not from small manufacturers that stay in business and have anything but stratospheric prices). I say let Urs stay software, and if someone else wants to invest in a custom interface and hardware to run his underlying VST (like Crumar building the Hammond clone Mojo around Guido's VB3 VST) then let him.

[Urs]

Yep.

Some promising research went into Diva quality filters with the CPU footprint of Zebra's XMF or better, as a base for new filters in Zebra3. I think I found a good set of general solutions in the past few weeks. Part of it is that different ways of computing the same filter work better in different situations. For instance there's a method that uses next to no CPU on low resonance settings and/or low cutoff. But it uses a lot of CPU when cutoff and resonance go high. Another method works much faster at extreme settings, but doesn't go down much with low settings. So I'm thinking of measuring performance on the fly and switching methods dynamically.

Sometimes I think I should start a blog. But then, I'm afraid it'll die down quickly...

[zethus909]

UI overhaul

please dont do that lol.. the way zebra looks stock is perfect...dont change that, the UI is one of the best things about Zebra.....all the skins out there i have found to be way less effective and hard on the eyes than the stock look.

[EvilDragon]

You're probably in minority, lol.

The stock Zebra skin doesn't handle resizing well (especially increasing the zoom).

[Urs]

UI overhaul

please dont do that lol.. the way zebra looks stock is perfect...dont change that, the UI is one of the best things about Zebra.....all the skins out there i have found to be way less effective and hard on the eyes than the stock look.

No worries, it's going to be very easy on the eyes.

We still have to code some extra UI features for it. Not sure when to do that, hence not sure when to bring it out (along with a Z2 update for those new UI features)

[zethus909]

You're probably in minority, lol.

The stock Zebra skin doesn't handle resizing well (especially increasing the zoom).

i have the zoom on 160%, i also dont use a computer monitor, i use a 42inch LED TV....and sit far back from the screen....it looks good like that...lol, maybe on a small pc monitor it doesnt...or a laptop...

[EvilDragon]

2x24" LCDs here, about a meter from me, and zooming in makes things very blurry with the default Zebra skin. No go.

[TheNickC]

UI overhaul

please dont do that lol.. the way zebra looks stock is perfect...dont change that, the UI is one of the best things about Zebra.....all the skins out there i have found to be way less effective and hard on the eyes than the stock look.

The aesthetic of it as far as color choice and contrast and everything is pretty great, I also love ZebraHZ and pretty much all of u-he's other plugins I've seen. I wouldn't worry too much about that, but improvements can always be made, like maybe being able to zoom in on the spectroblend view for the for easier editing. That kind of thing requires an overhaul as opposed to a skin, new UI means potentially better functionality.

[exmatproton]

2x24" LCDs here, about a meter from me, and zooming in makes things very blurry with the default Zebra skin. No go.

Same here. Some good scaling, like the newer Hive, is crucial for a good exp.

[Perimeter Sound]

Hi all, sorry if I missed it at some point in the convo, but has there been any word about new or improved/expanded comb modules for Z3 ?

Offhand I'd rather not spout off my own silly ideas for them, just to say that -more- options would almost certainly please some of us loyal users eh.

[Apostate]

You know, after having taken out the Zebras for an extended walk this past few days, I'm going to be an unabashed fanlad and wonder how much you really can improve on basic perfection? I mean, I even use Zebra for at least half of my PERCUSSION fer crissake!