Review of Toontrack’s EZDrummer Plugin
by Big Al on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 | 8 Comments
Here a great review of Toontrack’s EZDrummer by Joe Gilder from Home Studio Corner.
In this same category, I also like Addictive Drums by xlnaudio.
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Al – I am running a iMac with Pro Tools LE and a Digi003. I have BFD2 but I can barely use it as it is such a resource hog that it makes Pro Tools pretty much unusable. How are EZDrummer and Addictive drums as far as sucking the life force out of your DAW? I don’t even like to mess with the thing because it’s so frustrating and I end up using Xpand and hating how it sounds.
Hello John,
I hear you on the BFD thing. I assume you’ve tried running the slimmer instances of it?
EZDrummer and Addictive are both easier on the CPU. I’m running an older singe 1.8 PowerPC G5.
I just instantiated EZDrummer. After all the samples have loaded, my CPU is sitting at 30%-40%,
45%-70% with a groove playing. Same sort of spread with Addictive Drums.
Give one of them a try, it might be just the ticket.
Al – Thanks! I downloaded the demo of Addictive and looked on the activity monitor to compare the two. BFD2 uses a lot less memory but between 80 and 90% CPU. Addictive uses a lot of RAM but ticks down around 20 – 40% CPU. So it looks like the issue is CPU utilization with BFD, which I really don’t know how to fix. I’ve got everything in BFD set as small as possible. Tried running out of RAM but when I do this, I lose the connection to my 003 while it’s loading because it takes so long.
I’ve got 4GB of RAM on order (using 2GB currently) and I plan to pick up a copy of Addictive drums.
I’m on a 2.8GHz iMac Duo core, running Snow Leopard, and the latest PT LE. I bought this system because my PC couldn’t keep up when I was tracking my last CD a few years ago. The iMac setup has never performed the way I had hoped it would. I’ve tried all the tweaks, optimizations, etc. that I can find and it’s still not as powerful as it should be, IMO. I don’t know if it’s just the nature of the beast or what.
The lack of performance from your iMac is not what I typically hear from other users.
Keep in mind the CPU figures I gave you were from my old single 1.8 PowerPC G5. It’s intensive but I can still run BFD.
I think something is up with your setup. What are you using for your PT buffer setting when you try to use your virtual instruments?
HW Buffer 1024 (only one that would work)
Host Processors – 1
CPU Usage Limit – 99%
DAE Playback Buffer – Level 2 1500ms, cache size large
Plug in streaming buffer – Level 2
If you’re running a Core 2 duo, try selecting 2 Host Processors, pull your CPU Limit down to 90% and set the Cache Size to Normal. See what happens and report back.
Well, it didn’t die. Can’t really tell if it works any better, though. How low can I realistically expect to run the HW buffer?
As low as possible while tracking and as high as possible while mixing, when latency is not an issue and you need maximum CPU.