zebra (HZ) problem with late-ish windows 7 update?

[glittle]

This may be premature since I haven't had a chance to do extensive debugging yet, and the problem seems a little unpredictable. But it seems as if lately, at least one of my Cubase projects using Zebra HZ has gotten very unstable. Some symptoms:

+ Zebra HZ (and Zebra, but I have a semi-old version of Zebra) will respond to midi for about 1/2 second, then cut out and Cubase hangs. The volume meter on Cubase shows as pegged. If I go to the Instrument panel and remove or disable Zebra HZ (if Cubase is otherwise responsive to menus... at times it freezes completely to where I have to kill it with the task manager) the volume meter comes back down again and Cubase goes back to normal.

+ When rendering a piece of music, at the moment Zebra HZ's first note, the render cuts to silence. It appears to have finished normally according to the export dialog, but when playing back you hear the cut to silence.

+ Sometimes, when playing back the song, it plays back fine, no hangs when Zebra's part comes in.

+ Sometimes Zebra's edit panel is blank... just a frame with nothing in it.

I thought this may have had to do with a recent install of VLC media player, so I uninstalled that. No help. I then did a restore to a restore point from before the last windows update. After that, brief testing seemed to indicate all was working fine. This may be misleading, because I was not yet at the point where I was doing exhaustive, duplicatable steps... I was just poking.

After running windows update, I tried again and the problem seemed to have returned.

As I dive into this, I'm curious if anyone else has seen similar behavior?

Other specs:

RME Multiface
Windows 7, latest updates
Cubase 6.5

-glenn

[glittle]

By the way, when I use Diva on that track instead of Dark Zebra, I have yet to have a hang. Again, this is not rigorously tested since I don't yet know the exact pattern to reliably duplicate the problem. But anecdotally, the problem "seems" to be related to Dark Zebra.

Also, I just checked, the title bar on my Dark Zebra, and it says "2.7.0". I'm not seeing anyplace else to get a version number... is that the right place? Where on the u-he site can I find the latest version number and download for DZ?

Thanks...

[Viktor [TUC]]

Hi there,

would you do us the favour and maybe also send an email to support[at]u-he.com and report that? It's going to end up in my hands most likely. If you do, please also include the rev numbers of your Zebra and ZebraHZ installation, which you'll find on the right-hand side above the Matrix tab.

Thanks
Viktor
u-he team

[glittle]

Will do. Wanted to add more here as well. It's strange. I still can't reliably duplicate it, but somehow, at some point a project gets in a mode where this happens. When in that mode, Dark Zebra does not *always* hang, but once in that mode I can reliably get it to hang by:

+ select init patch (just a single oscillator)
+ add VCF1 below the oscillator

At this point, it still works. If I change the VCF mode down the list to LP Xcite, LP Allround, LP MidDrive, it still works. But once I switch the mode to LP OldDrive and then play a note... boom... hang.

At one point, I had it to where if I turned *off* Kontakt in the instrument panel, then DZ worked fine. But I can't duplicate that unfortunately.

So, to summarize, once the project is in some sort of state which I cannot yet duplicate but has something to do with which instruments have been loaded and perhaps have generated notes, I can then reliably duplicate the problem by selecting VCF1 LP OldDrive (or several other) modes, and then playing a note.

My rev # is 3304.