Product: FXpansion DR-008 DXi
Price Paid: US $49
Submitted
10/16/2004
at
08:27pm
by
Anonymous
Reviewer Background
:
I've been making music for over 40 years. I play keyboards and harmonica. I'm the author of the world's best-selling mehtod on jazz and rock harmonica styles ("Jazz Harp," Oak Publications, NYC 1980).
I am using DR-008 v1.20 as a DXi plugin under Cakewalk Sonar 2.2. I use this plugin on a fairly wide variety of groove-oriented music.
My computer is a Dell model 8350 with a 2.4 gHz Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB of RAM, and Windows XP. I use an Echo Mia soundcard. I monitor on Alesis M1 speakers.
Ease of Use
:
10
The DR-008 is easy enough to use, especially with a brief read through the manual. The manual is spare but adequate. Installation was simple and trouble-free. I installed standalone, DXi, and VST versions of DR-008, and have tested the standalone and DXi versions.
The software is suppled with a good selection of drum kits on CD. By registering the software with FxPansion, I acquired access to FxPansions's FTP site, where I was able to download hundreds of excellent kits. A high speed internet connection is HIGHLY recommended for this purpose, because the kits, even packed in RAR format, amount to hundreds of gigabytes of data.
It is very easy to get good sounds out of this software, given the high quality of the kits and the audio engine. DR-008 offers several options for drum note MIDI mapping, including the standards used by Sonar and Cubase; this makes it easy to apply DR-008 to previously programmed MIDI drum tracks.
Sounds/Sound Quality
:
9
The kits supplied with this software, both synthetic and natural-oriented, are generally very good to excellent in quality. I am in the process of remixing several of my recent recordings, most of which were originally recorded using either drum kits from the Roland JV-1010 module or the Sonic Implants Large and Small Ambient kits. The Dr-008 kits offer better variety and overall better sound than either. The cymbals in the Wizard acoustic kit that ships with DR-008 are much better, with far more extended and realistic decay, than anything in the Roland or Sonic Implants kits. Sounds respond well to nuances of velocity. I haven't hit maximum polyphony yet. Kits and inividual sounds can be layered; DR-008 allows specification of multiple pads to be triggered by a single MIDI note.
The software allows specification of the number of stereo and mono outs, and even the number of effect sends.
Overall Rating
:
10
This software has recently been made available through GForce at a US retail price of $49. At this price, it is incredible value for money. The version offered by GForce is 1.10, which works just fine. After registering with FxPansion, the buyer can download the version 1.20 upgrade, along with hundreds of drumkits. As noted previously, a high speed internet connection is practically mandatory to access the downloads. But even those without a high speed internet connection will find the version 1.10 software to be very similar to 1.20, and the drum kits supplied on the intallation CD are excellent in both sound and variety. The installation CD also includes useful MIDI files that go with specific drumkits and styles. The software also imports both Native Instruments Battery kits and Steinberg LM-4 kits; I've tested this feature and it works perfectly.
On my 2.4 gHz P4 system a single instance of FxPansion 1.20 uses about 1% of CPU -- about the same as simple soundfont players like LiveSynth Pro. The software is completely stable.
I am sure that this is not the very finest drum plugin on the market. Fxpansion's own BFD offers higher-quality acoustic kits. But this is a very good-sounding and performing drum module at a rock-bottom price, about 1/6 the price of BFD. It costs about the same as the Large and Small Ambient Kits from Sonic Implants combined, and is a much better value. It's a clear case of 80-90% of the value of the high-end premium tools at 15% of the cost, and as such is highly recommended to almost any buyer.
