Atlas 2

Truly excellent. Within 1 minute you can get some really interesting drum beats that actually sound brilliant. The random generator works very well and gives you something very usable and not just a mess of sounds, you can do that too if you want. It's so much fun to use and is quite astonishing for the price. It's great just to play around with when you have a spare 10 mins and save the results. It's a massive time saver but helps creativity also. The updates are really good too, so much more has been added since V2. Respect to the dev.

This one is helping to arrange and sequence your samples in an upgraded world of sounds. A must have.

Atlas is a sample manager that also may be used as a basic drum VST. A unique ability and perhaps its biggest problem is that it classifies your samples according to what Atlas thinks they are. If it doesn't understand where a sample fits in its classification then it doesn't report it or classify it. Atlas does not allow you to set up your own classification categories. There is no sample name classification as an option if the classifier does not understand what to do with a sample. If you want to use this for FX, techno or electronic sounds, I have found this VST not very useful. Also if you have small libraries of samples the classifier doesn't seem to work very well. I like the graphical representation of samples (which is not customizable) and this aspect of the program is unique with a lot of potential however graphical sample maps with a lot of dead space in them are not very useful. The program comes with a sample library that shows it works however Atlas's sample recognition analyzer was probably tuned or coded for it. I would not buy this as a drum VST it is very basic. Geist is a drum VST. For me a good sample manager would have worked fine but the current limitations make it so I don't use Atlas very much and was a waste of money. The developers do not update this very often so I don't have much hope for the future of this product.

I have to say, the day of having THE drum machine are nearly over.

This plugin is brilliant in that it does recognise the different samples (kicks, snares, hats etc), the random kit generator is brilliant as you can come up with so many different drum kits.

I hear the developer is thinking of adding a step sequencer with a saved pattern per drum kit, this will complete this brilliant plug in.

Instantly change the feel of your tracks with different drum sets.