Dimension drums vs Session Drummer sounds

I have just opened the same sfz in both Session Drummer and Dim LE (I am using LE deliberately to keep it simple)

I have tried all combinations of snares. The snare in Dim LE sounds completely different from the apparently same snare in SD.

Can somebody (a) try or confirm this (b) attempt an explanation?

Thanks for any input

Nick

This could be due to effects/envelope settings, or actually different samples. Personally, since to me drums are crucially important, after being completely underwhelmed with SD2 in Sonar 6, I went with Battery 3 which offers a way more complete range of drum sounds and kits.

ORIGINAL: OldNick
You can load an SFZ into SD2, by Loading into a pad. But although the SFZ is an entire kit (from Dim Pro) the only instrument you affect is the current drum (kick, snare etc.) SO you would end up with the rather ridiculous and possibly crashing effect of having a whole SFZ kit for every drum! <G>.

In SD2, each pad lists the notes it will play back (kick: 35, 36 / snare: 37, 38, 40 / etc). If you load an entire SFZ defined kit into a pad it will only load the matching note definitions for that pad and everything else will be ignored. If things don't match up it's because the DimPro SFZ doesn't conform to the SD2 note definitions. To get things to work you'll want to make a note of the SD2 notes for each pad and copy/paste the appropriate sections from the DimPro SFZ files into a new file and match up the note numbers so SD2 will play back as expected. SD2 can play back up to 49 different instruments in a single kit. Feel free to put all 49 instrument definitions in the same SFZ file, load that SFZ file into every pad, then save everything as an SD2 kit (right-click on PAD at the top). Then you can quickly load the entire kit with a few clicks.

I bought Battery 3 also and use it for drum/percussion sounds, but think their cymbal sounds (except for some rides) just don't sound convincing. I've recorded my own cymbal samples and use SD2 to trigger them rather than Battery 3 because it has a much simpler interface and seems to take up less resources on my system. However, with very large samples libraries SD2 doesn't seem to scale well from my experience. At one point it seemed like SD2 was re-reading the entire sample library every time I pressed play and with a 300 MB library it caused a significant delay. Creating a "preview" version of the kit seemed to help out.