Not sure if it’s kosher to discuss BFD competitors on here but I was wondering if anyone has ever tried Natural Drum Kit, previously known as ns_kit7.
Just discoverd it today and am pretty impressed by the demos, one of the only libraries I’ve heard with cymbals that compare to BFD:
https://naturaldrum.com/audio-samples/
There’s barely any info on it though, no youtube videos, no shots of the interface. Let me know if you’ve ever used it and how it runs.
I’ve always been of the opinion that any drum sample library, not matter how good it sounds, is quite hindered by having to using it in Kontakt rather than a dedicated drum VST like BFD3.
It does sound lovely though but I’d want to see what mixing and tweaking capabilities it has within kontakt.
Steve
I agree. Most of my drum libraries are in Kontakt though so I’m used to it, but the tweakability factor is essential. I’m on an e-kit so I need good mapping and velocity curve options, and enough round robins.
I always get leery when a library boasts of having loads of velocity layers because that sometimes means they skimp on the round robins. Great for playing on a keyboard, but on a e-kit you get machine-gunning.
Wow, that does sound fantastic actually. Very reminiscent of BFD in the detail and feel. The cymbals sound great, especially the hihats. It doesn’t say, but I’m assuming you need the full Kontakt and not the player? I do have the free version of HALion Sonic, but not sure if that’s compatible either.
Nice find @JDrums.
Soon as I saw Kontakt I gave up, sounds great but no thanks, even Halion which I use a lot in Cubase, not as a drum interface, no thanks. Pity.
ns_kit7 doesn’t need Kontact at all. I’ve been using it with Sforzando for years. (The SFZ2 mapping files alone take up 2.27 MB… that’s all the kits and all the kit pieces velocity layer mapped. It’s lovely.) For a product that’s nearly 20 years old, it’s still pretty much the market leader in terms of realism, in my view - ever other kit I’ve heard sounds like it’s so heavily post-processed as to be unusable except in a specific mix.
(Maybe I need to hear more kits - I’ve got set in my ways 
)
Interesting.
I’ve only ever used Sforzando for playing around with soundfonts and have consistently had trouble with popping/crackling interference. Usually those noises imply an audio buffer issue but it happens regardless of which settings I use. It always affects drum and percussion patches the most.
Any experience/advice with that?
I have 32Gb RAM on my live performance machine and my samples are all on fast SSD, so I guess that helps .
Sforzando:
For my mapping of Rock Kit with Sticks (19" ride, snare on, inverse CC4), that takes 8616.19M of RAM (*).
I run at 48KHz sample rate, 64 sample buffer size, no over/underruns on either my ancient AudioFire4 or mangy new UA Volt2.
(*) Just to note that the way I map and load, each kit’s pieces take up RAM separately… so I have to be a bit sparing or get swapping… even with swapping to SSD, there’s some degradation in performance but generally not too much of an issue: just play the kit for a while to “swap in” the samples for that kit…
32GB, nice!
I only have 8GB but never had issues with other samplers/libraries, only Sforzando. Can’t even run a 10MB general midi soundfont without crackling. Might be an issue with the soundfonts themselves rather than sampler running them.
Appreciate the help though, glad it’s working for you at least.