I usually build up a rough drum track for a new song in SD3 inside Cubase Pro using all the Toontrack GROOVES – I think I own all of the sound libraries and MIDI packs. But then, I usually go tweak individual MIDI blocks (not sure why they’re called MIDI blocks instead of GROOVES, since they’re all in the GROOVES tab, but never mind) and save them for reuse. Or play a new MIDI block with my e-kit, whatever.
But SD3 does not make this as easy or streamlined as it should be, IMHO. For one, as has been previously reported, the Track view doesn’t even show the given Name of the GROOVE/Block. And now, as I’m working both at home on my DAW and on the road on my laptop, I see that SD3 uses a bizarre, machine-local location for my “User MIDI” blocks: ‘~/Music/EZDrummer/User MIDI’ and as far as I can tell this cannot be changed, nor can additional paths be added. I thought maybe the Grooves | Folders | Add lined folder… option would do, but those folders are read-only; you cannot save to it from SD3.
First of all, why is the path based on EZDrummer at all? Can the path be changes? Can I add more paths?
Now, being a software engineer by trade, I know my way around the shell, so sure, I just dropped into bash and symlinked a location in my Dropbox to ‘~/Music/EZDrummer/User MIDI’ on both my machines, and I’m fine. But you can’t expect non-nerds to do that, right?
I’d like to see SD3 get a lot friendlier to user-edited Grooves/Blocks and that kind of workflow, in general:
- make the User MIDI path user configurable and nameable.
- allow multiple User MIDI paths, e.g., I might have several locations for different projects, styles, etc. Yes, I know you can have subdirs in the User MIDI dir, and that’s useful, too, but different.
- Enhance the Track view to show the Name of Grooves/Blocks. This is just as important for purchased sound libraries and MIDI packs, too.
–jdm
Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.1.7Operating system: macOS Catalina (10.15)
