[brainwreck]

Hey Fred, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with all this electronic drum stuff, including drum samplers. To me, nothing beats playing on a real kit, even a cheap kit in a small room. Over the years, I have owned a bunch of drum samplers, and they all leave something to be desired in one way or another.

On addictive drums in particular, I would say that it's strength is in how much control it provides. All the audio processing stuff aside (there is alot of it), each kit piece has controls for pitch, pitch envelope, volume, and volume envelope, as well as a separate pitch for overhead/room (together) and individual levels for each piece in the overhead and room channels.

And there is plenty of control over velocities as well, with each piece having a user defined velocity curve (and preset curves), upper and lower velocity limits, and global velocity limits. And there are some nice controls for hi-hat response, allowing for making adjustments of the relationship between the openness of the hi-hat pedal and openness of the samples being played. Most of this stuff is in the map window (you can grab the demo to take a look, or search for youtube reviews).

Personally, I find the amplitube envelopes, velocity controls, and hi-hat controls very useful. Ringiness/deadness and amount of attack can be shaped pretty radically using the amplitube envelopes.

Also, for kick and snare there are controls for balancing mic channels of front/back and top/bottom respectively. And the room channel has a control for mic distance.

I would say that the weaknesses of addictive are that it adds an additional 64 sample buffer with no way to turn it off that I can tell, and the rooms don't sound natural to me (although, much better to my ears than the onboard rooms in the roland modules). So for example, there is around 1.5 ms additional latency when using addictive drums over ezdrummer, and I really wish that addictive had a lower latency mode. Playing through it has been ok in terms of latency, but lower latency is always better. And on the room channel thing, I think that some sort of reverb/modeling is used in place of actual room microphones, like what amp sims tend to use.