I had been manually putting my drums together before I bought this, and after hearing a few pieces put together by people stating they used Jamstix, I had to go out and buy it!
It creates variations and fills in real time rather than rely of stringing MIDI files together, and it will jam along with either MIDI or audio from another track in your DAW which is a great feature. You can also put together your own patterns, either from a MIDI file or by dragging and dropping in a cell matrix.
First impressions were that the UI is not that user-friendly. This seems to be a common criticism of it and one that most people hope will be addressed in future versions. It's not that it's difficult to use, it's just that it's, well...ugly...
The sounds that come out of this are fine - very well sampled drum kits with a very realistic sound. If I had to criticize the sound it would only be that there is not enough variation between kits - maybe a broader range of kits would have been more useful. However, if you don't want to use the Jamstix kits, you can always get it to trigger another sampler that does have the sounds that you want.
Nothing wrong with the documentation that comes with this, but it is maybe a little difficult to understand because it uses screenshots of the UI. If the UI itself was more clear and well laid out, then I'm sure the documentation would seem a lot better.
For presets you get the various kits, the various drummers, and various styles. I think these could be expanded greatly, particularly the variation in kits and more than one example of each style. Having said that, there are plenty of tweakable parameters, so if you don't like it you can change it.
Customer support from Rayzoon is excellent - they have got it exactly right - if the customer has an issue they address it. There are far too many companies out there who are more interested in selling their product than dealing with customers.
Value for money? Absolutely! This is a steal at less than $100!
As for stability, I've had no problems with this at all. It's rock solid and isn't too resource hungry, even when you load some of the larger kits.
I'd recommend this software to anyone looking for a flexible, virtual drummer.Read Review
