> Show me another developer with this kind of maintenance for such a long time.

TAL is definitely up there. u-he and TAL are at the very top of my list, of the few companies I don’t ever regret buying from. And that’s saying a lot, I have trust issues.

That’s extremely detractive and unkind. More devs should consider releasing discontinued synths as freeware rather than abandon them, and comments like this are unsupportive to the max.

Full Bucket, while his synths are decent, doesn’t have filters or oscillators as fancy (or deeply modelled) as the ones here. OB-Xd, also nice, is more tailored towards a specific, loose, unstable type of sound, and again, filter/oscillator quality isn’t quite the same standard. It’s a pretty subjective comparison, you just like what you like, and that’s fine.

And it’s just unfair to compare things to monsters like Surge or Vital, as those are extremely unique. Of course they’re better. There is essentially nothing free on that level, except for maybe Odin 2 and ZynAddSubFX. It’s quite rare to even find a free synth with a flexible mod matrix. Most free synths are pretty standard fixed designs with 2 or 3 oscillators.

There exists an immense graveyard of old synths that were abandoned, never to be seen again by anyone other than those who fly the black flag.

So now it’s been liberated, freely available, forever, to those who want to use it. And unlike V-Station, it doesn’t require any license file download (which wont remain up forever!). So it appears safely preserved for any host that will continue to support 64-bit VST2.

Unlike many commenters who are unimpressed with this synth, no doubt spoiled by incredible beasts, I can assure you that the components are high quality, and the modulation capabilities are flexible without being overwhelming.

In the early days of VSTs, some of the worst sounding synths by today’s standards, costed real money. Atom Pro cost $30 USD in the year 2000. It had not a single LFO. SC-101 cost $40 USD in 2001, and sounded terrible and could blow out your speaker if you weren’t careful with the resonance (that’s not a good thing!). And Model-E cost a whopping $200 USD in the year 2000, and was ultimately an underwhelming, lifeless Minimoog emulation attempt.

There are free synths that were far better than the commercial ones I just mentioned. The obvious example is Synth1. But in my honest opinion, the oscillators and filters in kHs One are much more livelier and dynamic than Synth1.

It’s not a powerhouse, but it’s a great virtual analog. If this came out instead of Nord Lead in 1994, it would have an even greater legacy. Use it for classic analog sounds. Experiment with its surprisingly flexible modulations and filters. Use it to learn synthesis. It’s now free.

I agree with most of your points, but I’d like to add some points to the Zebra2 example.
My understanding of it is Zebra3 will not be 100% preset-compatible with all the patches they put out before (a shame, really but… those things happen). So if you want/need those presets, you can still buy the Legacy bundle, which comes with ALL the presets banks. That’s more than 3000 previously commercial presets. Last update for Z2 was august 2021. It’s not a long-discontinued stale product. Last new feature is actually from nov 2019.The dev tools are recent, so they -could- still provide some support.

Is it ideal? Hell no. Is it bad? Eye of the beholder…

They could make it more clear that the upgrade path to Z3 is a burnt bridge on the website, that’s for sure. They’ll get salty emails at some point. ;-)

If we’re playing the what-if game, I would have welcomed them giving away for free Z2, without any preset, and selling the preset bundle for the people who want them. But that is up to them, innit?
signed, not-a-fanboy. :D

‘Subtle changes in appearance or vst3 support, apple silicon support or even resizable GUI are marketed as a brand new version even if sound processing is basically the same’

‘It’s like in music software business legacy code is another word for vintage, when it’s a bad thing anywhere else’

First synths that come to mind are Sylenth1 and Spire

Awesome, thanks for the heads up, Ra. I’m off to download em!