Third Take

In the last month, Toontrack has not only released a software update for EZ Drummer (now version 1.1.0), but also a couple of weird new EZX drum libraries – a hip-hop library called Claustrophobic and a weird “Twisted” drumkit with trashcans, hubcaps, and other oddities.

If you’ve been thinking about purchasing EZDrummer, now might be a good time – through the end of May, they’re giving you a free EZX (an expansion drum kit) if you buy EZDrummer. The EZXs sell for around $90. That’s a fantastic deal.

Toontrack has released EZplayer Free and you can download it, for free, if you make an account at their website.

What is it? It looks like the MIDI clip organizer from EZ Drummer in a standalone plugin, allowing you to organize MIDI clips and play them back through a variety of samplers – EZ Drummer, Drumkit from Hell, BFD, and more. You still need to have a sampler and a host program, but now I guess you can easily map MIDI clips from one sampler to another.

My guess is that this is Toontrack’s next step in their plan to take over the world. They already have a couple samplers – EZ Drummer and dfh – and are building a formidable sample library with the EZXs they continue to release. With EZplayer, now they can start selling MIDI libraries, not only to EZ Drummer customers, but other sampler users as well. It also makes it easy to sell samples to someone who already has MIDI patterns.

Toontrack’s released a patch to EZ Drummer 1.04 and an update to the Cocktail kit.

I got this email from Toontrack:

At long last, demos for all three of the upcoming EZX expansionpacks have been posted. Check them out in the demos section of www.ezdrummer.com. The EZX:s will be delivered to our distributors in the last week of october and we´d like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers for their patience in regards to the slight delay in delivery.

There are three expansion packs (EZXs) coming out: Latin Percussion, Drumkit from Hell, and Vintage Rock. Get the details and listen to the demos.

Seeing as how each EZX is going to be about $80 (street price), I’m not going to run out and buy all three. I’d really like to have the Vintage Rock kit for the brushes, and the Latin Percussion kit for the shaker – but that’s a little steep for things I’m not going to use on every song. Even so, it’s nice to see Toontrack deliver on its promise of additional kits for EZDrummer.

If you have a MIDI drum track in your Sonar project, you can use a Drum Map to replace the piano keys in Piano Roll View with the names of the drum samples. Here are Drum Maps for Toontrack’s EZ Drummer – both the Standard Kit and the Cocktail Kit. You have to be logged in to toontrack.com for the link to work.