Working the City Beat

Toontracks Superior Drummer 2.0 New York Studio Legacy Series ($299.97) offers an impressive array of drum sounds recorded in some of the Big Apple's finest rooms. Each drum kit features multiple miking, including close and room mics. A "bleed" feature lets users dial in how much natural spill will be heard in the mics, while a well-designed mapping scheme offers more realistic performance variations than typical drum samplers. The program can be used as a stand alone or as a plug-in in all the popular formats, and comes with a range of MIDI performance files and EZ-Player Pro software, which can load and play them, back. Toontracks.com