Reason did a similar thing with a console view, using an SSL console emulation. Audio wise, it’s essentially just plugins.
@fred_g : it’s must be a live thing since it does virtual instruments these days and can’t/shouldn’t be printed. I don’t know if it’s all tracks or just the 8 “Mix buses” though.
Speaking of drums, an upgrade to BFD3 is only 49 bucks for the next wee while:
I really do wish that one of these drum plugin developers would well enough get down the detail of a real kit. All the tricks for approximation leave quite a bit to be desired. I have owned BFD, Superior, Addictive, and a few others. All of them were too many kits with too little detail in terms of layers and too little in way of accurately translating what is played. People who program drum parts probably don’t mind near as much.
Pfft, you and your obsession with meatspace! 
I don’t know, I’ve only ever had shots of drum kits in studios as a non-drummer sneaking a quick blast so no expert on playing actual skins. Had edrums in the past but no real hi hats or anything with them. BFD3 though sounds really good, I have Steven Slate, Studio Drummer, Abbey Road, Battery but BFD3 seems a cut above the rest.
They all sound at least pretty good in recorded quality and recording aesthetics, to really good, as collections of one shots. But even a novice drummer can tell that some things aren’t right when playing through them, because of too big gaps in velocity range and similar lack of tonal changes when playing across the surface range of a drum head or cymbal. Drums as an instrument actually have a shit ton of nuance and can be really expressive in dynamics and range of tones, even without the player really trying to do anything more than play a basic rock beat. I figure that to get it right someone needs to do some hardcore drum and cymbal modeling to arrive at the equivalent of photorealistic vector graphics so that those full dynamic and tonal ranges are available vs. very limited sampled snapshots with workaround tricks. That is likely a problem that AI could be used to work out as is currently being done experimentally with photorealistic graphics in realtime.
Also, there is a lack of expected tonal consistency when playing through sampled drums because of how limited numbers of samples are re-used. When I play a drum in a given positional range on the head at a given velocity range, my brain expects a given tonal range of sound. Since some samples are being re-used outside of their natural tonal positions and velocities, expected tonal consistency is off. With some drum samplers this is really bad, but it is never great in any of them. At least not great enough for a novice drummer not to detect the discrepancies.
When I traded my edrums kit for an acoustic kit, I did so because of these issues. My brain wanted to hear realistic dynamics and tonal range; both the available variety and expected consistency, recorded quality be damned. The worst offender by far was hi-hats. And using a real hi-hat was a big improvement. But after that was settled, over just a little time the same issues for the other kit pieces became much more obvious.
I definitely don’t mean to put anyone off of edrums and samplers here. This was just my experience. And I did end up missing having the edrums around for low volume playing. But keeping them would have been a love / hate thing. Love for being able to play anytime without pissing anyone off. Hate because of the lack of realistic expression.
And apologies for what might come across as anti-sale rhetoric. Getting deals on plugins that I wanted was fun sometimes when I was doing that. But there was a lot of plugin sale perpetuation to beat back too.
You are probably right about everything there, virtual stuff is always a compromise if we are looking for the real deal from all angles. I’m more of an “it is what it is” kind of guy and massively appreciate all of this stuff for, well, what it is. I’m sure you do too, but with more of an eye on what it should/could be.
That being said, it’s truly nuts that we can have sticks and small foot reflectors with a camera and a laptop these days and have a very playable drum(ish) kit. No Linux version of Aerodrums though so it’s on the studio/games desktop but might go on the dormant Windows partition on the new laptop at some point.
I think Hornet is on sale atm for 60%, unless it’s over
Real quality plugins there for not much dosh
They have regular 50-70% sales tho, so I’m no sure it counts here
They offered me 15% off for my birthday, I passed on that 
I’m waiting for Karzog 's plugs or Playbeat to go on sale next month, if they do
And Bitwig
Best sales I ever found on plugins was trading with people on KVR and elsewhere.
Interesting, shame the console plugin doesn’t do independent saturation for left and right channels. I think I need to make a JS to do that with a slightly wonky compressor for a channel thing. I wrote a C++ wrapper for EEL2 a couple of years ago with an eye to being able to prototype with JS-esque code, should really get back in the saddle at some point!
Really wish that I had kept tinkering with JS. The only finished thing I made in it was definitely useful to me for a minute (MIDI velocity range expander for Roland drum modules that only put out like 90 max instead of 128), but there was so much more ahead. It seemed like a good learning and tinkering environment.
Yeah, I’m no DSP guru though so the habit of JS devs showboating with essentialy unnamed variables and compact code is a bit of a PITA. Code can be a self-explanatory tutorial for the next guy if done well. It’s so much nicer than the VST workflow of recompiling and reloading the DAW + plugin. Visual Studio lets you hot recompile some code with some preconditions and there are a couple of other things out there that do similar things, but JS is more direct.
I saw this guys code recommended recently for good programming and clear commenting
And this live stream js coding
Much nicer than the stock JS (the last I looked), thanks. Apart from the DSP from a quick glance. Well commented functions, but not the meat and veg within. I’ll give the videos a watch too, cheers!
I figure they are sharing / not sharing.
ADPTR AUDIO Metric AB is on sale for $37 at Plugin Alliance, down from $199 USD
Haven’t tried it but it gets a lot of love in these threads for it’s analysis tools
What is the benefit of that plugin? I mean, when I mixed stuff I would listen and check the rms and peak levels all against references inserted into the project.
Auto-levelling the reference tracks is it’s main feature I guess, just speeding up that workflow
I probably wouldn’t cover it all, it seems pretty deep,
just read through those threads I linked, they’re pretty informative
But I’ve since discovered Plugin Alliance has some new copy protection layer that increases loading time massively,
according to this thread on Reaper
I’ll pass until they fix it
All DDMF plugins are on sale now at Sweetwater
eg
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MagicDeathEye--ddmf-m
This one’s a vari-mu clone
Relevant thread here discussing alternatives etc
Following another rabbit hole, I found out Waves is having a weekend holiday sale
https://www.waves.com/free-plugins-memorial-day-sale-2022
$30 USD per plugin,
plus buy 2 and get 2 free
so, $15 each for 4 plugins, $60
Any recommendations from the rebooters?
Maybe nobody here uses Waves, I don’t have any either
Pretty good price tho, that’s Hornet-level sales
These 2 channel strips get some love on the usual forums
After that, I got nothing
https://www.waves.com/plugins/ssl-ev2-channel#image
Wonder if this stacks up to the real thing
https://www.waves.com/plugins/abbey-road-tg-mastering-chain#image
Edit:
Bundles are 50% off also
https://www.waves.com/bundles#sort:path~type~order=.default-order~number~asc