Too much hit variation in sampled drumkits?

[Gwilym]

Okay, this is something that's been quietly driving me mad for almost 15 years now, and I've never managed to find a useful search term to get answers about it. Hopefully someone here can give me a bit of perspective.

In short: is this a normal amount of snare variation? Because to my ears, there are two distinct snare recordings in this, and it is utterly random which one plays on a given beat: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qUM...ew?usp=sharing

Those are both great-sounding snare hits! But it's so inconsistent about which one I get that it almost feels like the sort of thing a real-life drummer would get fired for. Is it? Am I just being persnickety?

Here's the same beat on a different kit. Same thing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xvk...ew?usp=sharing

This happens with every single virtual drumkit I own. Granted, most of these are from the same Kontakt library: EastWest's Colossus. The same behaviour also happens in Goliath, the Play engine version of that library.

(Play actually has a CC command for 'reset round robin,' supposedly to avoid unwanted variation, but it doesn't seem to make a difference here, perhaps because it's a randomised thing rather than a sequential one.)

So the obvious solution could be not to use Colossus/Goliath drums and instead get something better. But what makes me hesitant here is that I can use a kit from the Kontakt Factory Library, and it does the same thing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MpZ...ew?usp=sharing

So is this normal? Is this actually desirable? If so, is this the sort of variation that I should be using a compressor to tame? If so if so, do I apply that compression to just the snare? Or the kit as a whole?

Obviously, this is less noticeable in a full song where it's not just the drums on their own - but it is still noticeable, and I don't think it's *only* because I'm listening for it.

And just in case there's something about my drum programming that's directly causing this, I've attached a screenshot of that beat. It's super simple and extremely on-the-grid, but I get the same snare variation thing even when I'm playing live on a MIDI keyboard, so I don't think it's a quirk of this particular bit of sequencing (even so: please still feel free to give pointers about the sequencing if anything jumps out - as short and basic as the clip is, it's pretty indicative of what my drum programming tends to look like, so anything that improves this would improve everything else).

Thanks. And I'm sorry for the blind URLs; I didn't realise they'd turn out that way. I assure you they're all 20-second MP3s. If this is against forum rules I can remove them and find another less obfuscating place to upload them.

Oh and if you can't even hear what I'm talking about, please say so! That'd be useful information too.