Hey all. Whilst I do not actually play drums I'd love to include them in my music. I have a MIDI keyboard and a program that allows you to play drums on the keyboard. However, as I said it's MIDI, and the sounds are frankly terrible and pretty limiting.

The plus point of it is that it's easy to get timings as you're "hitting" the drums in real time. I also use Acoustica Beatcraft and whilst being a great program it is very time consuming to create extended tracks.

Does anyone know of any programs that use real-time MIDI inputs but have a better sounding and extensive sample library? Thanks!

You make MIDI sound like a cussing word here - what do you mean: the sounds of your keyboard are frankly terrible and pretty limiting? What program are you using?

But, to answer your question: Native Instruments' Battery. This is basically a VST sampler which can hold individual samples under each midi note. You can also tune and tweak each individual sample and add filters and effects and so forth. Good fun, but not freeware. I think that's what you're looking at - maybe you can find a freeware sampler like that at www.kvraudio.com ... good luck.

Thanks! Haha I love MIDI and think it's highly useful. It's just the program I was using for MIDI drums (Sound Studio II) was very limiting when it came to the drum track.