There is one advantage to using a commercial library in a DAW to enhance or add drum tracks over sampling the BIAB hits. The BIAB Drum hits at the end are sampled at one velocity. Commercial drum library hits are sampled at multiple velocities—like real life, the tone of a drum changes when it is hit harder or softer.

In addition, you have round-robin where multiple hits on the same drum use different samples to mimic drummers do not hit the same spot each time. BIAB Real Tracks/Drums, by using real drummers, does that part well on the tracks but the hit samples at the end of the tracks cannot.

Since BIAB tempi are quantized, it's easy to build a tempo map in any DAW and add a drum track using a commercial library. The down side: it is additional work and the best results are obtained by thinking like a real drummer.

There's another option. Drumagog ($99-$199), Slate Trigger ($149) and others have drum replacement apps that can hear the BIAB Drums and let you substitute other libraries. The apps include a few and you can buy add-ons or switch to other libraries. You do this in a DAW, of course but, if you like the playing on a track but not the actual samples, there's your solution without having to program a track from scratch.

I do all of the above in my work.

Some of the commercial libraries are inexpensive while others cannot be justified unless you have a film budget to charge them against. Many DAWs include basic libraries that are ok but it's the 3rd party stuff that gets deep into multi-velocity and round-robin.


BIAB 2024 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5