So I still don’t really have an answer to this question. Which is totally absurd. It’s a simple question. No one seems to have an answer.

But I did come across a sentence in the manual that mentioned “no bus fx”. It literally just says that these presets are optimized for multichannel outputs and will allow us to process the drums in our DAW.

wtf?

Honestly, this is just more frustrating. There doesn’t seem to be an actual difference. The drums are processed the same whether we choose “no bus fx”. I am starting to suspect that this was actually not implemented the way it was supposed to be. I really do think that these presets are supposed to give us dry audio samples. So for pop punk ezx, that means the drums wouldn’t be overcompressed to all hell and there wouldn’t be any reverb on the snare (or toms).

We actually do get the dry audio. the compression and reverb effects do not show up on the individual channels. Rather, all of the compression gets summed up in the compression channel, and all of the reverb goes to a reverb channel. So essentially, compression and reverb are not applied as bus fx. Instead, they are fx sends. A few things about that…

well yeah. why would anyone ever want their drum reverb in any other way? this shit is always mixed in as a send effect. And  compression send is the same as using parallel compression.

….wtf? Why are they presenting this as  a “feature”? This is what almost anyone would just do with drum processing anyways.

And if you don’t want these fx, it’s as easy as not routing those channels out to your daw. Or, what I do, you can route these fx out to  channels in your DAW and simply mute those channels. You can also adjust the level of those fx by quickly adjusting the faders in your DAW. So that’s kind of cool. BUT THIS IS NO DIFFERENT THAN THE OTHER PRESETS. We get the same exact thing, either way, just as long as we use multichannel outputs and route the audio to separate channels in our DAW.

In conclusion, there is functionally no difference between these presets. Including “no bus fx” presets is literally just redundant if you have to go through the mixer in the plugin and route the channels out anyways.  I can only assume that this was not what was intended, and someone made a mistake, but toontrack does not care to address this in any way. That’d be fine- this is not a huge issue. nothing is actually “broken”. It’s just stupid. That’s all.