Z3TA+ ALMOST caused us to miss a remix contest deadline

Greetings all, please allow me to share my tale of woe regarding the Z3TA+ and hopefully offer some hints to others that may experience technical problems with this synth.

But first, here is the competition entry that the Z3TA+ almost cost us: Shameless (Meme Mellow Mix) any votes would be GREATLY appreciated.

On with the story.

My wife and I were thrilled when we had the opportunity to buy the Z3TA+ on Black Friday for $20. We're on a pretty serious budget so we were very thankful for this special and with an impending remix competition looming on the horizon we were excited to feature our new synth in it!

After dragging and dropping the VSTi into Ableton Live our otherwise rock solid stable DAW started to do something it hadn't before... CRASH.

And did it crash. We literally lost HOURS AND HOURS having to reboot all the time as it would kill Ableton so dead that it would be stuck in the task list and impossible to End the Process for. We were, however, on a deadline and I didn't want to take time messing with the machine knowing that in a worst case scenario it could actually make things worse.

But it seemed that the bigger our composition got, the more the crashing occurred so in a fit of frustration I decided to upgrade my sound card driver which had delightful results - ALL the crashing stopped.

1. For those having a problem with the Z3TA+ crashing I first recommend upgrading your Sound Cards drivers.

Thinking we had all our problems solved we continued to work, and master and tweak and do all those things that you do when trying to meet a deadline for a competition.

And THEN we did a final Render (Export Audio/Video) only to discover that EVERY track that featured a Z3TA+ was COMPLETELY silent. This, BTW, is with 2 hours left before the competition deadline and a minute after they won't take any more submissions.

In a panic I went to each Z3TA+ track, looked at it's options and instinctively started reducing the render quality and fortunately discovered that TURNING OFF 2x Antialiasing and setting the OUTPUT type to NORMAL allowed the Z3TA+ to export its audio.

2. If your Z3TA+ doesn't produce any audio for your Export/Final Audio rendering then reduce the audio rendering quality until it does.

I have to say, my wife and I really aren't happy about this. We bought the Rapture/Dimension Pro bundle and were so impressed with it we wanted to buy more Cakewalk products, thus the purchase of the Z3TA+. Imagine our surprise and disappointment when we discovered all the problems.

We get it though. Cakewalk bought the Z3TA+ from RGC Audio or some such thing but does this mean it is no longer supported or properly tested?

Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest. Thanks!!

Good Day AT,

Ah, thank you so much for the history. I didn't realize that Rapture and Dim Pro was written by the author of the Z3TA+ - those synths are so stable and work so effortlessly and patch browsing is a joy (though a search would be a welcome addition) that I'll admit I was shocked.

What I think is a real shame is that there isn't a version of the Z3TA+ that uses the Rapture/Dim Pro code & interface for stability because the Z3TA+ has all of the Dance music synths that we NEED for professional productions; synths sounds, filters and effects that the Rapture just doesn't seem to have. :(

It definitely wasn't a CPU problem either as we were barely touching 24% utilization (Live shows CPU status at all times).

We will bring this to the attention of tech support but unfortunately now every time we use a Z3TA+ synth we're going to have to do a render test and I will probably waste my time trying to figure out the best quality settings before the exported audio renders silently.

But as I mentioned before we'd be all over a Z3TA+ expansion pack for the Rapture like a rash!! :)

Overall, yes, I do love the Z3TA+ despite it's age (its sound is so great we didn't even realize it was old) and as soon as I discovered I could assign multiple filters to the modulation wheel and then automate the modulation in Ableton I was very happy. It's amazing how much oomph and variation you can create with a automated modulation build-up on a part! :)