Groove Agent

Oh common Steinberg... Are you kidding me? I was testing and trying completely full trial version in Cubase 7 today and comparing to BFD3 (FXPansion) or Steven Slate Platinum Drums..this must be a joke. Sound is incredibly bad. No dynamics at all, sounds almost like a toy for kids! It has a lots of possibilities, but the most important - sound is really not worth to pay even 30 EUR.

i bambini fanno ho....................

really? sounds incredibly good to me.

After Version 4, this program totally changed and improved.

Almost different program except its name.

It's an incredible great drum plugin now.

GA 4/5 is NOT a good drum software. If it was the only one in the world, well I guess it would be called "the best". But, today there are dozens, if not hundreds, of drum software out there, both in the electronic and in the good old fashion way. I am using old school drumsets and just occationally electronic. A few much better drum softwares have already been mentioned. I would like to add Toontrack, EastWest and even the Abbey rd series from Native Instruments. So what is a "good" drum software? What should it be judged by? I guess the sound is first. It has to resemble, or be exactly like, the drum it tries to emulate. A drum yields different sound depending on both the surroundings but also how the rest of the drumset is set up. Software that are able to emulate different set ups are thus preferred. Next I would say comes the Velocity and Flams. That is how many velocity layers the software has and how it handles the bounce reflection of the drumstick after the hit. Next comes the bleed, that is how much of another drum you hear when hitting one drum, especially how much of the snare you hear when stamping on the kick. The posibility to get a realistic level, or to remove it totally is essential. Then comes the worksflow of the GUI. Here it is essential that you can have each drum on separate channels and each drum claims its own reverb, delay and other FX. Some of the softwares also gives you the opportunity to construckt a drumtrack within the software (like EZ Drummer), that some might find handy. All in all Steinberg fails on some of the criterias, especially the velocity part. It also has a browser that is very oldfashioned and seems like it was taken out of an old DOS world. It drags the workflow down. The GUI is further not intuitive and a lot of clicks is needed to get to "the right place". Sound I guess depends on what you really seek, but if it shall resemble the real world drums others are preferred. How anyone can put GA up to the top is beyond me and the only reason I can think of why it is so is either because those people do not know drums and that the software may be their first encounter with drums, or that they have no deeper knowledge of the far better softwares out there.