Yep, you can create new kits for Hydrogen with the Natural Drum Kit (former ns_kit7) but Hydrogen does not do disk streaming so unless you have a huge amount of memory, you will have to create limited kits. I happen to have the ns_kit free version. Just this one takes 25% of my memory (4G of RAM). You are thus warned 
I used to have a copy of the free version along with the definition file for Hydrogen, but I’ve lost it over time. You wouldn’t mind sending me a copy of the free samples would you? I’m considering buying the full samples, now that they’re available again - but I haven’t managed to figure out QSampler yet and I don’t know if there would be anything better to interface my drums with. It’s unfortunate that Hydrogen doesn’t stream from the disk like Qsampler can with gig files. I need to figure out MIDI in general. sigh…
I will give you a link to a tarball soon.
EDIT : split in 2 files, to be ‘tar jxf’ in your drumkits directory. Samples are at 96kHz, you may resample them if you need (I can provide a script to do so).
http://rapidshare.com/files/104850179/ns_kit7free_file1.tar.bz2.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/104852868/ns_kit7free_file2.tar.bz2.html
But you should really try the Addictive Drums demo and see if it can be run from your e-drum. I am almost convinced it will. I can try to help you in the process.
If you decide to try it, you will need wine (0.9.58 preferably), jack-dssi-vst and the dssi-vst plugin. It’s all available on the net if not from your distro repos. Once you have them installed, configure wine to emulate WinXP (type winecfg from a shell and the rest should be easy), select alsa and jack for audio (although I am not sure this is needed at all). Install the AD demo with a simple ‘wine Install Addictive Drums Demo.exe’. Then go to $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/VSTPlugIns, copy Addictive Drums Demo.dll into your /usr/local/lib/vst or /home/yourself/vst, rename it so that the filename contains no space e.g. Addictive_Drums.dll and then, launch it from a shell : ‘vsthost Addictive_Drums.dll’ or 'jack-dssi-host dssi-vst.so:Addictive_Drums.dll
(Note: I changed the vsthost code to my taste because it by default appends the process ID in the jack client name. It is annoying when you restart an ardour session and the drum plugin has another name that makes ardour unhappy. So I removed the PID from the jack client name altogether to always have the same name for this client.)
Now, in qjackctl, you will see Addictive Drums as a jack client, all its audio outputs present (see manual for what they correspond to), and you will see it in the ALSA Midi tab so you can route any MIDI hardware to it. I have a digital piano which plays it very well but playing drums from a piano keyboard sucks a bit So I use it inside a sequencer like rosegarden (waiting for ardour to come up with MIDI 
and program my drum patterns very easily. I set all clients to be jack transport slaves et voila
It is really working great and is very stable. No xruns, no crash. The only annoying thing is rosegarden which sometimes screws up a bit. I could use other sequencers but I like the very useful and easy to use tempo ramping in it. I wish ardour could get inspired from it.
Thanks for the links - very much appreciated. I’m downloading now. Addictive drums does sound interesting, perhaps I’ll try this demo during the weekend.
You know what would rock? If virtualized hosts could interface with JACK. I’ve just (last night) installed WindowsXP on a virtual machine using VirtualBox (which also supports virtualization) and it’s running very fast and zippy. I needed it for web development testing, but seeing how quick it’s running, and knowing I can allocate as much memory to it as I want, it would be amazing if I could somehow make it recognise my RME soundcard and work with any one of the multitude of drum sampling software that’s out there, but output to JACK.
It outputs to alsa though. =]
no no, you can output to jack I wrote about it in the VST gui thread in the How do I forum. I actually did that one week ago You see, VirtualBox can output to pulseaudio. You simply need to configure pulseaudio so that it uses jack (sources and sink).
That’s the only way I get sound out of my wirtual winxp since I disabled everything but my RME HDSP in my PC. For the output it works really well! although you may need a biffy CPU and enough RAM. But for the input, well, you hear something but it is totally unsable. Using VirtualBox as an dynamic effect proc would be the ultimate worst choice I think :D:D
But if you have VSTi’s that can only run in windows and are just interested in outputting to the host (jack), there might be something here but you should not care about latency I would think
Ah, I see - well that’s a shame. It would have been nice to play my drums via the virtual machine install, outputting to JACK, but I do want low latency. Nevermind that then…
I notice you mention that you own an RME HDSP, which is the same card I have. Just a standard 9632 all on-board card. Do you use irc or have an email address that I can use to bug you with a few more specific questions? I’m on the #lad and #ardour irc channels on freenode.net, if you would prefer not to share your email address.
=]
Hi breakerfall,
You can contact me at ‘aegirr at gmail.com’
My system is using the Multiface II external IO box but the HDSP part should be the same (using the same ALSA driver at least).
Cheers!
PS: I rarely go on the IRC channel because I don’t want to be distracted too much by realtime chatting.
PPS: about pulseaudio, I find it to be a neat audio server for different reasons than jack. I have my studio in my living room. I sometimes watch live TV or movies or listen to music from a laptop I have around. When I want a big sound from my studio speakers while watching a movie from my laptop, I fire up pulseaudio in my studio PC, and I choose my PC as a pulseaudio server in my laptop so that the audio of every app outputting to pulseaudio from my laptop will end up coming out of my studio speakers. Very neat. A bit like netjack (which I tried positively) but more mature and flexible. You can launch pulseaudio in every linux box you have at home so that you can on the fly choose where to output your audio from whatever source using pulseaudio.
correction to my previous posts about installing AD from DVD. My wine dlls were a bit messed up with win32 native dll’s which prevented proper installation (therefore, I had to use a virtual winXP guest to install and copy files over). Lately, my wine installation got so messed up that it totally broke. So I removed wine altogether, reinstalled it from scratch using the debian sid version (wine 0.9.58) and recreated my $HOME/.wine with untouched wine dll’s (standard installation).
Then I tried installing AD from DVD and it ran without a glitch. I then had the courage to try the update that did not work before : proceeded perfectly and the resulting VSTi (the updated one) is running flawlessly! I notifed the AD dev team and one of the devs got thrilled by this success story and will start fiddling with Ubuntu Studio (I will probably guide him a bit at the beginning). That’s not bad news for linux users who are still longing for a drum software that does more than existing native solutions (Hydrogen, jack-beat, etc). So who knows ? there might come up a native linux version of AD. I know I know, it’s commercial soft, closed-source, etc. But it sounds really good!
I second that… using MIDI is not to my taste but the sounds from AD are really very good indeed, much better than any pure sample-based drum machine.
That’s great! I’ve just installed WINE, so it’s a base install, untouched - apart from configuration. If it works really well, I’ll certainly consider buying the full version. I really want to try this when it’s released: http://www.toontrack.com/s20.asp
Great! yeah, mapping is a bit of an issue. There are other users who complained about it but it’s not unsolvable. Since I don’t have an e-drum myself, I cannot help you on that one. Try to fetch the manual and you may find a few hints. The AD forum is also another place for finding out certain things.
For the track outputs, each mixer strip has an ‘out’ button at the bottom. Simply activate it. The track mapping is as follows (cf. manual)
out1+2 : master
out 3 : kick
out 4 : snare
out 5 : hihat
out 6 : cowbell (or Xtra in updated version)
out 7 : tom1
out 8 : tom2
out 9 : tom3
out10 : tom4
out11+12 : overhead mic
out13+14 : room mic
out15+16 : extra effect bus (this is useful if you want to add some punchy effect to some of the drum pieces like a bit of distorsion on the snare, etc)
Again, read the manual, it’s quite useful.
And you seem to be on the right “track”
Just in case anybody else is interested, I found an application to allow mapping of MIDI input to a directed output called eDrum MIDI Mapper - http://www.chaoticbox.com/edrum_midi_mapper.php
It works perfectly via WINE. I simply run the Addictive Drums (or whatever other destination app/host I want to send MIDI to), open up this application and create and save / load a preset that maps incoming signals to outgoing signals.
For example, I can map any MIDI note that my edrum sends, to a different MIDI note that Addictive Drums expects for a particular instrument.
so you’re a happy drummer now
Yeah I have installed eDrum MIDI mapper and all seems well yet AD does not come up as an option as an output source any suggestions?
K I got it to work by sending it through my MIDI through yet I seem to have undesired latency any suggestions on this??