Oh ya, man. SD3 is pretty impressive for a freebie. It's one of the reasons I bought X1. The included sounds are kind of meh but you can pick up some nice expansion packs. I highly recommend the Andy John's kit. I think it's only forty bucks (sometimes goes on special) and it really brings SD3 to life. The included kits don't have enough velocity layers for my tastes and they sound kind of weak but that's subjective of course. Cheers.

Watch the Drum Production videos in the following link. They use SD3...

http://www.cakewalk.com/C...NARU.aspx/Master-Class

He uses the Step Sequencer though and uses an older version of Sonar so watch for the little text bubbles that'll tell you to find certain things in the X series and try using the Piano Roll View for more elaborate drum sequncing. Cheers.

Excellent! Thanks Gents!

CF


 Native Instruments seems to be pushing Battery out of their line,

I am not sure where you get that from, but you may be right, development of drum products seems to be focusing on Kontakt with the "Drummer" series, West Africa etc.
 
Updating to the 64 bit version of Battery is probably your easiest option as you are already familiar with the program and if you already have Battery 3 its probably a free update. Even if it gets discontinued you will still have quite a few years use out of it.
 
Are you talking about a sampler where you are going to use your own samples, as opposed to one that comes with proprietary content? If I wanted to do this I would pick Kontakt, OK its not got the drum machine like interface but at the end of the day you can still map a sample to any MIDI note an trigger it from your pads. You can map velocity layers and round robins and by splitting your samples into different instruments up to 16 output channels, add effects, write scripts. You can be as simple or as complex as you like.
 
Toontrack, BFD and Steven Slate will not let you map your own samples,(unless I am missing something). You can use your own samples in Session Drummer 3 however.

BFD2 and SSD4 do let you map your own stereo samples.  Session Drummer 3 would fit the OP's requirements though.

Rail

For me, Battery wins as an all purpose drum machine. It's so logical and simple, you can make kits on the fly by simply dragging samples from the browser into it, hitting "learn" and hitting a key on your controller. You can make some pretty out there kits from the one-shots you get free with Sonar, and there are so many high quality free and paid drum samples out there. I recently bought the "Driven Machine Drums Strikes Back" package of lovingly sampled vintage drum machines which require very little additional compression or EQ to sit well in a mix, and it's so easy to drag them into Battery to make kits. And then the multi-out setup is easy in Battery - even if you don't want to do this, the "in-house" processing is very good indeed. When I first got Battery I didn't use it half as much as the Kontakt kits, but now I use it more than anything else. It's just so intuitive and practical.