EZ Drummer. Commercial sample based drums synth from Toontrack. There is 10 days demo.
Toontrack has supported the development of this overlay.
Functionality coverage
Complete. Without groove section.
Operations
Most controls have context help. Press F1 for audition which keys can be used with particular control.
The overlay has 2 pages, Kit and mixer. The kit page allows change particular kit peaces and adjust corresponding parameters. The mixer page allows mix the kit inside the plug-in or route mic channels for multi-track mixing inside DAW.
When you navigate to the kit page the first time, you will be asked to learn the layout. Two coming with EZ Drummer and all extra extension packs have different set of kit peaces and different graphical representation for them. Sibiac can automatically recognize each layout, but that is relatively lengthy procedure. So you will be explicitly asked to started learning and please be patient and do not use the computer till the recognition is finished. The layout will be learned only once per extension pack, the result is saved on the disk.
Channels and effects in the mixer are not only extension pack but also particular preset dependent. But unlike with kit page Sibiac is recognizing the mixer page on the fly without explicit learning.
I recommend to read original Toontrack documentation to understand the concept and operations in this plug-in. I just want to mention several terms which can be confusing.
Each EZ Drummer pack provides a set of sounds for kit peaces, one kit layout and several presets.
A preset defines kit layout, mixer channels and used effects. It is possible to change kit peaces and many parameters, but not the layout nor effects.
Hidden inside each piece dialog, there is another term called kit. A kit defines used kit peaces in particular layout.
The MIDI mapping for kit peaces is not possible to change individually. But there are several mappings for different e-drums.
MIDI mapping for mixer and effects can be defined by user.
Known problematic points:
* there are many OCR recognition failures. Sometimes true text can be used but that is not persistent. So you can hear different words from effectively the same text, for example for preset name.
* during preset loading the focus is temporarily moved to some other window and it sometimes does not return back to the plug-in automatically, especially when the keyboard is used before
the preset is loaded completely.
* the overlay works with graphics and EZ Drummer use animations. Navigation and audio feedback lag a bit at several places when it waits for the picture update.
* escape can not be used to close some rarely used internal dialogs. Please explicitly tab to the close button in this case. But escape should work fine for all dialogs used during normal workflow, including settings dialog.