Judging by Zebralette 3, Z3 will be way more resource intensive, or at least for a subset of its features. I'm running an i7 12700 and some of the presets I made brought it to its knees, FM stuff specifically. Z2 is very light on resources - both CPU and RAM. I remember doing some testing, and 10 instances of Zebra HZ came out at around 300 mb of RAM. If I recall correctly, Pigments gobbled up 1 gb of RAM per instance with very little shared RAM usage if you added more instances (ie every new instance will still gobble up a ton of RAM).As it stands, there isn't any reason for me to buy Z2, since no upgrade path + Z3 on the horizon = why would I buy Z2?
Z2 also has gazillion presets available, and it's still a massively competent synth that could've been released today and it would've gotten a ton of attention. I tinkered around just for fun about half a year ago, testing its VA against Jupiter and Juno VSTs. You can make it sound bang on in some cases, and it will still remain competitive in a lot of others. Zebra 2's VA is really something.
There's still no ETA on Z3 and we've no idea what the full feature set and the workflow will look like. You might end up preferring Z2 for some tasks, for all you know (just the light resource usage alone makes it worth considering).
Statistics: Posted by alberto_balsalm — Thu Jan 02, 2025 8:39 pm