Long story short: I'm really desperate for a solution to how time-consuming and annoying my current process with drum samples has gotten. So, first part:
Is there a free, or relatively inexpensive drum sampler/sample playback vst that has support for multiple velocity layers per pad/key and multiple outputs? All I'd really need beyond that is the obvious support for loading outside samples, even if it's just limited to one-shots... support for specific sample formats isn't a particularly big deal for me here.
Also, does anybody know of a midi effect/plugin that might limit playback to only a certain midi note-notes? (For instance, a plugin I could slap on a track that would make it playback anything on b2 and c2, but ignore everything else?)
Basically when I do more rock-oriented stuff (which is.. well, most of the time) I usually end up with my best results playing the drum tracks 'live' on my master keyboard for the bulk of it, and limiting the programming aspect to cleaning it up/tweaking/the finger-twisting fills. All the options I've used/messed with have at least one major drawback that makes life much more time consuming: SFZ/soundfonts are fine but it's quite annoying having to isolate each set of midi-notes and then either bounce them or put them on separate tracks routed to different instances of SFZ... and other samplers I've tried using (loopazoid comes to mind) are fairly nice for a lot of things, but the lack of velocity switching ends up giving me fits and making the programming side of things even more tedious than usual.
If anybody knows of either of the specific things I'm looking for, or has any other suggestions for me (preferably one of the ideas that make me slap my head really hard and go 'why didn't I come up with that!??') it would be much appreciated... thanks in advance!
