Best Drum synth/program

kawika
Hi,
 
Is there a killer 3rd party program preferred?
 
thanks,
 
Kawika

Depending on your needs, which you have not really described style wise, BFD3 and Toontrack's Superior Drummer 3 are very advanced drum players. Check out Superior Drummer's Song Arranger feature. These both are more of the "buy a drum pack" variety because their audio files are in proprietary format. We're only a few months away from big sales (typically 50% off) so you might want to wait.
 
Toontrack's EZDrummer is the "little" brother to SD3. It has all the features but is more of a "polished" drum sets way of doing things whereas SD3 is more along the lines of raw drum sounds that you sculpt.
 
BFD3 is excellent too.
 
After that there is Steven Slate's Drums V4 for full on ROCK DRUMS!!!!. But, V5 should be coming soon and so a purchase of V4 *may* mean a free upgrade to V5 if you time it right (and of course no one knows when that will be).
 
XLN's Addictive Drums is also in the same ilk as all the above.
 
For some really "out there" drumming look into Jamstix 4. It's crazy good in that it models drummers style of playing and you can tweak those styles to create your own flavor on that style. It's drum samples are a bit dated but in the end you can export it's MID and play it against anything.   
 
Personally, I do not use any drum players (I own all the above and more) that allow for loading samples and if they do I'm not into that feature so I cannot be of help there if that is your overriding need.

sfz provides more than multi-velocity capability to Session Drummer. It also allows pads to play more than one instrument. Each pad in Session Drummer is hard coded to trigger on multiple notes. Sfz files provide the mapping function to assign samples to each note. As a bundled drum synth is was pretty good.
 
Still the Velocity synth bundled with P5 was arguably easier to setup because all the mapping was done in the UI. To bad it was never updated.