Addictive Drums 2 on your Mac — 2.9.1

Addictive Drums 2 is a virtual drum instrument plugin that turns your Mac into a full drum production studio.

Build a drum track

Pick a kit from the many ADpaks included in the Complete Collection, then drag in MIDI patterns from the bundled MIDIpaks. The interface lays out each drum piece clearly, so you can tweak the sound of the kick, snare, and cymbals without hunting through menus.

Shape the mix

Each kit piece has its own channel strip with EQ, compression, and transient shaping. You can blend the close mics with room and overhead mics to place the drums in a space, then adjust the balance until the kit sits right in your track.

Export or play live

When the groove feels right, drag the audio or MIDI straight into your DAW. Or run Addictive Drums 2 as a standalone app on macOS 10.13 or later, and play the kit live with a MIDI controller.

Runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs from macOS 10.13

Addictive Drums 2 runs on any Mac from macOS 10.13 onward, and because it supports both ARM and x86 64-bit architectures, it works on Intel Macs as well as Apple Silicon machines. The version here is 2.9.1, a 64-bit application. The full interface is in English.

The Complete Collection includes Addictive Drums 2 itself plus every ADpak, MIDIpak, and Kitpiece Pak XLN Audio has released. That means you get a large library of drum kits, presets, and pre-written beats and grooves all at once, without needing to buy expansions separately later.

Installation uses the standard procedure for a Mac application. You place the main archive and all split archive parts in the same folder, use a utility like Keka to extract the first file, right-click the .zip.001 file, choose Open With, and select Keka. The product comes activated, so you can start working with it right away.

Elena wants to make her mouse-programmed drums less stiff

Elena records and mixes demos for her band from a spare room in her flat in Berlin. She uses Logic Pro on a MacBook Air and usually programs drums with a mouse, but the results feel stiff. She wants the band's rough recordings to sound closer to a real performance before she sends them to the producer.

She opens Addictive Drums 2 as a plugin inside Logic. From the library, she picks a vintage maple kit ADpak, then browsed the MIDIpaks for a straight-ahead rock beat at 120 BPM. She drags the pattern into the arrangement, but it lands a little behind the guitar. Instead of moving every hit by hand, she adjusts the swing and timing controls in the groove section until the snare sits just behind the beat. The drummer she records with plays with a laid-back feel, so she tweaks the velocity of the hi-hat hits to match his lighter touch.

For the final mix, she blends the room mics up a few decibels so the kit sounds less like a sample library and more like a live room. She exports the audio straight into Logic's timeline and sends the track to the producer the same evening.

Click a drum piece to hear it, then browse the kit

You start with a new project in your DAW and insert Addictive Drums 2 on a software instrument track. The main window shows a drum kit laid out visually. You click a drum piece to hear it, then browse the ADpaks on the left side of the interface to swap the whole kit or just individual pieces if you want a snare from one kit and a kick from another.

Once a kit is loaded, you open the MIDI browser. The Complete Collection includes all the MIDIpaks, so you can search by style, tempo, or time signature. You find a pattern close to what you need, drag it onto the drum map, and the pattern appears in the step sequencer at the bottom of the window. You can adjust individual note velocities by clicking and dragging the bars, or shift whole beats to change the feel.

When the pattern plays, you open the mixer section. Each drum piece has its own channel. You can cut low frequencies on the kick drum, add a little snap to the snare with the transient shaper, or glue the whole kit together with the bus compressor. The room and overhead mics give you control over how wide and deep the kit sounds. You can solo a single mic to hear what it contributes, then blend it back in.

When you are satisfied, you render the drum track as audio or keep the MIDI region editable for later changes. The standalone mode works the same way if you want to practice or record parts without opening your DAW.

Swap kick, snare, and hi-hat pieces individually

A few useful details are built into the interface. You can swap the kick, snare, hi-hat, and other kit pieces individually, which lets you combine a heavy rock kick with a jazz snare if that fits the track better. The Kitpiece Paks included in the Complete Collection give you even more options for those individual swaps.

The MIDI browser remembers recent searches, so if you are working on several songs in the same style, you can pull up matching patterns quickly without re-entering the filter. The mixer view saves your fader positions when you switch between kits, so you do not have to rebuild a mix every time you audition a different ADpak.

If you use the standalone application, your settings and kit selections carry over to the plugin version automatically. You can also toggle the drum map view on and off to see only the editor, which helps if you prefer to work from a MIDI controller rather than clicking on the screen.

Set multi-output routing for individual drum faders

Before you start building a track, open the preferences or settings window. The output routing can be set to multi-output if your DAW supports it, so each drum piece appears on its own audio channel. That gives you individual faders and effects per piece inside your DAW mixer rather than adjusting everything inside Addictive Drums 2.

The MIDI note mapping is another setting to check early. If you use an electronic drum kit or a specific controller, you can reassign which note triggers which drum piece. That way, a hit on the hi-hat pad matches the correct instrument and not the ride cymbal.

If you plan to use the step sequencer for programming patterns, set the default grid resolution to sixteenth or eighth notes depending on the style you write. You can always change it per project, but starting with a sensible grid saves time when you drag in the first pattern.

• macOS 10.13 or later
• 64-bit processor (Intel or Apple Silicon)