Too many unanswered questions in the AD2 manual for me, or maybe I'm just not finding the answers.  So I'm hoping to find some here:
 
1) My favorite part of AD2 is the Beats page, because I think it is great that you can so easily sync the selected beat to a song in Sonar.  So I would like to put all the beats from the presets in the ADpaks I own in there.  But I don't see a way to do that.  It looks like the Beats page is only for MIDIpaks.   Is that true?  If so, how do you sync the beats from the ADpaks to a song in Sonar?
 
2) For that matter, why is it that MIDIpaks cost $19.95 for over 200 beats and ADpaks cost more than 4 times that much for 30 drum files (the presets listed on 2 pages)?  What am I missing?
 
Thanks for any elucidation.

I've nt tried tjis, but here are some instructions from their support.
 
1. Click the [?] button in the top right of Addictive Drums 2, then go to "Open External MIDI folder"
2. Drag a drum midi region from Sonar, or from Addictive Drums 2, directly to the "External MIDI Files" folder. A midi file should be created there.
3. Rename the midi file with the midi naming conventions
4. Go to the [?] menu and click "Refresh Library".
5. Now your beat should show up with categories, tempo etc. tags
 
.

I’m not sure I fully understand your questions and bear with me if I’m explaining the obvious. Once you have found a MIDI beat you like, the normal way of working would be to drag and drop that MIDI into the Track view. That can be accomplished both from the Beats page but also from the presets in the Explore page. But to answer your specific questions:

1. Unless the preset MIDIs already are in the AD2 Core Library (I don’t know, I have never checked), I don’t know of any way to include the preset MIDIs directly into the Beats page. However, this would be a workaround:
   • In the folder Documents/Addictive Drums 2/External MIDI Files, create a sub folder named e.g. Presets.
   • From the AD2 Explore page, drag and drop each preset into that folder. As the beat dragged always will be the current beat (i.e. the last one you’ve listened to) it is necessary to first press the corresponding Play button for each preset before dragging.
   • As the resulting MIDI file always will be named AD2Beat.mid, you would have to rename each MIDI file directly after the drop, preferably to the preset name. Or, if you are very serious about it, name them according to the MIDI File Naming Conventions as specified in the AD2 manual to make them possible to be filtered in the Beats page.
   • Once finished, go to the AD2 Help menu (the question mark) and select Refresh MIDI Library.
   • Now your presets will be accessible through the Beats page from the Library drop down. You will see an entry called Presets (or whatever name you gave the folder). Selecting it will display the contained MIDI files.
2. When buying an ADPak you essentially buy a new drum kit with bass, snare, toms, hi-hats, cymbals and percussion including a number of different presets. Each ADPak has a different timbre which is suited for one or more particular musical genres. It doesn’t contain any MIDI as such, other than the small number of MIDI files supplied in order to listen to the presets. To get MIDI files, you buy MIDIPaks, not ADPaks.

 
Edit: Just saw that Kamikaze beat me to it.
Edit: Added one additional step for this to work as described.
 

If you want to use your owned midi files with other drum software you need to do the following:

1. Log-in to your user account at www.xlnaudio.com
2. Go to this page:
http://www.xlnaudio.com/myaccount-myproducts/offline
(note the "offline" part of the URL, making it different than the regular My Products page)
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page where it says External Midi Files
 

dscoyne
Too many unanswered questions in the AD2 manual for me, or maybe I'm just not finding the answers.  So I'm hoping to find some here:
 
1) My favorite part of AD2 is the Beats page, because I think it is great that you can so easily sync the selected beat to a song in Sonar.  So I would like to put all the beats from the presets in the ADpaks I own in there.  But I don't see a way to do that.  It looks like the Beats page is only for MIDIpaks.   Is that true?  If so, how do you sync the beats from the ADpaks to a song in Sonar?
 
2) For that matter, why is it that MIDIpaks cost $19.95 for over 200 beats and ADpaks cost more than 4 times that much for 30 drum files (the presets listed on 2 pages)?  What am I missing?
 
Thanks for any elucidation.

 
ADPAKS are the actual Kit Pieces which make up the drum set
MidiPaks are the midi notes only, No Sound in MIDI
You pay more for the ADPAKS because that's where drum samples are.

Thanks for the great answers, but regarding the subject of my first question, something is not working.
 
1) I made a new folder: Presets.  Changed the file names to the name of each preset after dragging to the new Preset folder, all with the .mid extension.  Refreshed the MIDI Library, and they all showed up on the Beats page, each with a bpm of 120, BUT ALL BEATS WERE THE SAME when I played them.
 
2) So I tried dragging directly into the External MIDI Files folder.  I got a different beat than the ones in the Preset folder, so I dragged more of the presets into there, but ALL THOSE BEATS WERE THE SAME AS EACH OTHER.
 
3) I also found that when I dragged and dropped into the open space in the External MIDI Files folder, I wound up with the same beat in all cases as the repeated one in the Preset folder (different from the beat I got when dragging to the External MIDI Files folder icon).
 
So I have a total of 2 different beats on the Beats page from all the Preset files of one ADpak.  Anybody have any idea what is going on here?  Thanks, Don.

Ok, seems as if one additional step is necessary for my instructions to work. Apparently, the last preset you have listened to is the current beat. The beat dragged will always be the current. So before you drag a preset beat from the Explore page into the Preset folder, make sure it is the current beat by first pressing its Play button.
 
I shall update my instruction in post #3 to reflect this additional step.