Still waiting for an official answer to my questions. Not sure if I was a little too hostile in my first post or what but if this is indicative of TT’s level of support…..

@juicy said:
We can play or do not wish to use generic/generated content in our original music. 

I can play too. The problem is the amount of time it takes to program new grooves. I don’t have an electronic kit and well I’m not the greatest at drumming but I can drum. I can also program MIDI. I’ve spent way too many hours doing it manually. There’s something magical about getting new rhythms at the click of a button and instantly jamming to it. Not only that but I’m pretty sure the majority of the people using this feature still tweak and change up the generated content. I can’t imagine anyone actually takes the generated content as-is and creates whole songs out of it. But even if they did, it’s not much different than taking what your drummer generates for you. It’s not like any guitarist in a band with a real drummer is dictating every move that drummer makes. So the argument about generated content doesn’t really hold up that well. A real drummer played the grooves to begin with. The speed with which this program allows new rhythms to happen is the absolute best feature of EZD. It felt like I was jamming with a real drummer. That’s the one real masterful piece of this software.

@juicy said:
EZD wasn’t intended for people who want to get under the hood or deeper into mixing or changing things at all. 

It’s cute that Toontrack think they know what people want and purposely limit their options just because they can later try to up-sell them when they reach the brick wall of intentional limitations. I felt rather tricked when I ran into these limitations. On its face, EZD is everything a drum software needs to be. I was excited and in love. But once you spend a little time in it, you run into the brick wall. At which point the response seems to be “buy SD!”. They purposely keep you from being able to make it sound better. They bake in the effects per kit. They sum multiple microphones into one. Completely unnecessary and just a total slap in the face to people who thought they were getting the functionality it appears to have at face value. I can understand paying more for higher quality samples. I can’t understand their reasoning for keeping these two things in two totally separate programs/GUIs.

I write and record and mix and master. Like the vast majority of computer based musicians these days. Anyone who doesn’t do all these things is lacking the complete picture and their music will suffer as a result. If you don’t know how to mix then you’re going to get lesser quality results. Mixing is an integral part of computer based music making these days. It’s simple, it’s not some black art that needs to be addressed separately. The fact that I can’t turn down the ambience while keeping the cymbals in these kits is an absolute affront. EZD is awesome in a jam/practice setting but because of these unnecessary limitations, it doesn’t appear to be good enough for an album. And if it’s not good enough for an album then why should I buy it?

@juicy said:Finding a way to keep it just as simple and more powerful may be more of a challenge than us users can understand. Hopefully its on the way. SD3 will need to surpass EZD2 in every way and the clock is getting some cobwebs.  

Superior Drummer looks like it was designed in the 90s and was done completely independently from EZ Drummer. It looks like a pain in the ass to use. It doesn’t look fun or intuitive. It’s ugly and doesn’t even have the features of its cheaper sibling. All it has going for it is better sample quality and the removal of the mixing limitations. The changes that would be needed to make EZdrummer better are things that could have been easily put into the program. High quality samples, individual mics per drum component and leave the effects up to the user to apply. Very simply. But this would have made SD obsolete so they seem to have purposely not allowed this.

It makes me angry enough to not want to buy SD just based on principle. If I lose my ability to use EZ when I upgrade then I will certainly not. If I retain my license for EZ then I will be interested in upgrading just to stay in the same environment. But it still means I’ll be switching between two programs and that is enough of a deterrent that my eyes are wandering to the competition to see where my money is best spent. Lots of competition out there.