Steinberg pro-drums bundle 80% off - is this as good as it sounds?

Cubase
1

Steinberg have just announced a pro-drums bundle with “80% off”!

That is €499 reduced to €89.80.

Can anyone with experience please advise whether this is a true saving eg. are a lot of these already included in Groove Agent 5 SE or Full version anyway and are they usually on offer for much less throughout the year?

I’m very tempted if it’s as good a deal as it sounds.

2

Hi,

These are exclusive samples.

3

Hi Martin!

Thanks for confirming that they’re not included in Groove agent 5 full :+1:

Brgds
Ken

4

I’d be interested in hearing anyone’s opinion about these samples. For the price (143gb) sounds like a heck of a deal.

Although… some of the patterns seem to be the same but just grow in complexity as you go through them. Sort of like turning up the complexity in GA

5

I am trying to use them, but some of us can’t get them to work. Has anyone seen the issue described over here? "Pro Drums" not loading samples

6

I got the licensing issue figured out, and now I’m scanning through the library. I like it so far because you get loop mixes at any temp plus each mix seems to be broken down into sub groups; you get a group for the hat, snare, ride, etc. If you are looking for those multitrack recordings, then it might be what you want, but I mainly care about the final mix version of each loop. Either way, it was a good value for me.

7

Wow @aressler38 you have certainly been through an ordeal trying to find the solution and realized it’s another hoop we have to jump through during the installation process. I really hate the whole procedure of installing anything with Cubase as I have wasted many many hours with many crashes etc. over the years. Steinberg really should simplify the whole thing.
To be honest it’s reminded me of the time I will waste and wonder whether it’s worth it.
Therefore I’d really appreciate your feedback please on the real value of this bundle in practice in terms of variety and quantity of actual usable content when you’ve had time to try them out :pray:

Thanks for posting and have a great day!

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8

I’ve added some filtering to the media bay to identify about 4631 unique “Drum Mix Loop” loops. These are the mixed down loops with all the mic groups. They’re all sampled at 44.1k with 24 bit resolution. I believe this count is more reality than the advertised “111,000 acoustic multitrack drum loops.” I’ve noticed several loops that have virtually no sound because the drums under the mic group weren’t being played. For example “Metal - Kick Drum Loop 04_180bpn_ISPD3” has wav files that are quiet because the kicks weren’t going, so clearly, the 111,000 number is inflated.

The tagging could have been a little better. In order to determine if the loop is a groove vs a fill, you really need to look at the file path. Everything is organized into subfolders, and the name of the files within a group are all the same. You can use a filter in mediabay to filter grooves from the Path property, but it would have made more sense if the file name had more detail.

I picked this up for the metal loops. When I filter on Content Set and Name to get just the mixed down loops for the metal library, I see 545 results. Tempos range from 105 to 190. Each tempo has roughly 30 loops. There’s a lot of variation between the tempos. For example, a loop at 120bpm is not just the slower version of the same loop found at another tempo. Because of the lack of tagging, you have to just listen to them all baring the ability to determine groove or fill based on the file path. When I look through the other libraries, I see a similar pattern, which seems to show the math adds up correctly.

The recording quality is consistent throughout the libraries. I would have preferred higher quality files. Still, I think this is a lot better than what I got out of the box with Groove Agent. It’s all loops, which is what I was looking for, but I’m not happy about some of the virtually empty WAV tracks with dead air and taking space on my drive.

2 Likes
9

Thank you!

10

So, no multi sampled instruments that can be programmed? Just loops?

11

These are drum loops, not multi-sampled drums. However, since these loops are multi-tracked, they’re far more flexible than you might expect. You can use Cubase’s hitpoints to create a loop that better matches your song, or Groove Agent/Halion to create a custom acoustic drum kit, with round robins and all. That’s lots of work to be honest, but it could be a fun weekend project.

For anyone having licensing issues, try running the Steinberg Activation Manager to check if everything is working as expected. The middle column should say that the licenses are activated. If you had to activate the licenses manually, simply restarting Cubase/Nuendo should fix it.

Please note that, for technical reasons, these loops only work on Cubase/Nuendo 12 or later. The Cubase 11 (or earlier) MediaBay doesn’t know about the new Steinberg Licensing system.

3 Likes
12

Thank you to @aressler38 and @Romantique_Tp for you in depth information :pray:

13

I’ve purchased the Pro Drums bundle…Installing is a nightmare.
Probably because I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’ll figure it out slowly but surely.
In the mean time can any tell this fool how to play the samples?
Groove Agent, Halion? Or just pull them one by one into the project on an audio track?
Thank you

14

Direct import to audio tracks it is.

1 Like