The Kit window is where you assemble drum kits from the individual drums that have been sampled by XLN Audio, while switching to the Edit page allows you to make detailed changes to the sound of any individual drum. Most of the basic concepts behind the Addictive Drums interface are familiar from other products, but the way they're implemented here is uniformly slick and usually pretty intuitive. Once you've done that, you simply load Addictive Drums into the appropriate bit of your host application and away you go. Installed from a single DVD, it's authorised by a simple challenge-and-response process where you type your serial number into XLN Audio's web site. A Deep Hit Of DrumsĪddictive Drums is available for Mac OS X, including Intel Macs, and Windows, and supports the VST, RTAS and Audio Units plug-in protocols. At well under 2GB in size, Addictive Drums could find a home on even the most crowded hard drive, but it still provides a very comprehensive set of drum samples and processing options, thanks to a proprietary data-compressed file format that makes use of variable bit depth to avoid wasting disk space. So thank heaven for Digidesign's Strike, which squeezes its numerous kits into a relatively economical 6GB of compressed data, yet still sounds fantastic, and thank heaven for XLN's new Addictive Drums. I might as well have got a desktop PC, really, because the only thing I was going to get out of taking this lot on a long journey was a hernia. And a power supply for the external hard drive.

Clearly, an external hard drive was another must-have for the modern-day musician on the move. I thought it would take me ages to exhaust my 60GB system drive, but I could have filled it three times over just with drum sample libraries like BFD and DFH. Suddenly, music-making with a laptop didn't seem quite so free or spontaneous, and it was about to get worse. Oh yeah, and cables to connect it all together. And a USB hub for all those copy protection keys. All I needed was a pair of headphones and a controller keyboard. At last, I thought, I could make music anywhere, without a care in the world. When I got my first laptop computer, I naively looked forward to a life of unfettered musical freedom. Is it really necessary to give up an entire hard drive in order to get your hands on a good-sounding drum library? XLN Audio think not. An Addictive Drums kit can contain up to 12 instruments, but they are always in the same configuration, so it's not possible to have more than one kick, snare or ride cymbal.

Loading midi map into addictive drums