twaddle
 
I don't quite see how time would be of any great importance for a hobbiest ?
Yes I know if you're in full time employment, have children (or other distractions ) then obviously you don't have the time to spare but you're under no pressure to get projects finished and so in reality you have all the time you need.
 
Steve

True there is no external pressure to get things finished in a given time. But one still wants to get things done in the limited time available.
Tools like EZ Keys and the features that will be included in EZ Drummer 2 can help. As I am a (bad) keyboard player I will not entertain EZKeys, but something that helps with the drums I may go for, look at it like using a real drummer, you probably would not give him a score to play note for note, but rather indicate the groove and let him develop the part. It seems that EZDrummer2 may have that facility.
 
Much of my stuff is proggy instrumentals that do not conform to standard song structures so the song builder bit will probably be if limited use to me.
 
I totally get where Toontrack is going with this and I may have a use for some of it but the devil is in the detail.

Glyn Barnes

....look at it like using a real drummer, you probably would not give him a score to play note for note, but rather indicate the groove and let him develop the part. It seems that EZDrummer2 may have that facility.
 
Much of my stuff is proggy instrumentals that do not conform to standard song structures so the song builder bit will probably be if limited use to me.
 
I totally get where Toontrack is going with this and I may have a use for some of it but the devil is in the detail.

My thoughts exactly.   The Song Builder is probably not something I'd use often, if at all, but the ability to "dial in" a good number of groove variations in real time is very interesting to me.   Manually creating all those same variations just to hear how they work in context is completely impractical IMHO.     But as you said... actually using it will be the only way to know for sure how that pans out. 
 

Another sample of EZD2 released for your evaluation.  This is one of the new libraries that comes with the upgrade or new purchase.
 
https://soundcloud.com/to...drummer-2-modern-setup

Sounds great, I heard it a few minutes ago on facebook. The DW kit will be a nice addition to my toolbox!

Excitement builds!

It looks well worth 99 bucks to me. I'm in! Whoever posted the video... thanks!
 
J

Mod Bod
I'd like to remind (or inform) everyone that I was a customer before I was a betatester.  EZdrummer was the program that I wished FXpansion would have developed.  But they were into the Cadillac class drum sampler and I only wanted to pay for a Chevy at the time.  So when EZdrummer dropped into the market, I paid street price at (IIRC) Florida Music Co. and I think that was about $150.00.  It was almost a dream come true.

But unfortunately, when the grooves were dragged into SONAR the naming convention of the grooves was lost because of how TT placed that information into their grooves which (once again IIRC) were midi type 0 and Cakewalk was based on midi Type 1.  So I discovered what you had to do to get the format into a Midi type 1 format and that involved manually importing every groove into SONAR and then exporting it back into a very obtuse form of folder hierarchy that TT was using.  I hooked up with a programmer in on of their forums and he wrote a little program that would convert all of the Midi 0 files into Midi 1 and put the groove name where SONAR wanted to find it and then place it back into the Toontrack folder without EZdrummer being the wiser about it.

In the meantime, I also discovered, living in the very lowest keyboard keys, something curious.  The high hats were affected by my modulation wheel.  I could get the high hat to open on any given closed high hat but as soon as I stopped modifying the high hat values, the high hat would close.  I posted questions about this curiosity in the TT forums.  
 
Eventually, I got a message through back channels that this was because of something that hadn't been roped off and was not an intended feature so they (the staff) didn't speak of it publicly because EZdrummer was not intended or advertised as a live play VST instrument.  They told me which lower keys would act as I wanted so that I could achieve a varying sloppy hihat with my mod wheel.

And that's when I put two and two together and realized that the same engine driving EZdrummer was the same engine driving Superior.

 

Dave I remember all of this. I got EZD on your recommendation. Bought it from same place as you. Paid the same price, which I thought was high, but compared to the alternatives at the time, it was a great deal. And I remember the midi 0 /midi 1 thing. I can't remember but I think I got that conversion program from you? Or did TT give it out? But damn I had forgotten all about that stuff!!

Dave I remember all of this. I got EZD on your recommendation. Bought it from same place as you. Paid the same price, which I thought was high, but compared to the alternatives at the time, it was a great deal. And I remember the midi 0 /midi 1 thing. I can't remember but I think I got that conversion program from you? Or did TT give it out? But damn I had forgotten all about that stuff!!

 
No TT didn't give it out.    They were concerned that their updates would overwrite our changes and cause the midi libraries to act in unexpected ways for users that had modified their files.
 
Eventually the midi collections got so big that it no longer mattered how the DAW software named the clips, you couldn't find them anyway.  Hence, the need for the SEARCH window now showing up for the first time (I think) in any drum sampler.

Will ez2 consume much more memory compared to ez1? I was shopping for my first drum program and narrowed it down to ez1 or sd. I almost bought sd then I read a couple reviews saying that sd won't run on older computers because of high memory consumption and that beats will skip and the program will freeze. I decided I should buy ez because I'm running an xp with a p2 but I'm wondering now if all these new features on ez2 are going to lock up my xp box. I take song writing serious. I just don't have money to buy a new computer.

I run SD2 on XP and you can reduce the strain by a tweak on the interface but it runs ok regardless.

Btw, EzD 2 is
System requirements
Windows
Windows 7 or newer