RedSGShredder

Recording drums in software has a lot of advantages to recording real drums. You don’t need to own a drum kit, you don’t have to have know how to play the drums, and your drum machine will never make a mistake.

I use Toontrack EZDrummer (EZD) and Drumkit From Hell (DFH). In the past, I have used Acoustica Beatcraft. I strongly suggest using DFH or other Toontrack drum software over Beatcraft. However, there are many different kinds of drum software and drum machines available.

Acoustica Beatcraft

With Beatcraft, you create a drum track and export it external mp3 or wav files, which you then import into your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). It does not support MIDI. So that means every time you want to make a change, you have to go through the export process all over again. This is very time consuming. Additionally, the Beatcraft UI is not very good. It is not easy to copy and paste sections of drum tracks around. You can’t use MIDI drum tracks from GuitarPro/TuxGuitar files because it does not support MIDI. Lastly, the sound is alright, but it is very obvious that it is a drum machine because it sounds mechanical, and the toms are just not that good. However, you can load your own drum samples if you want.

Toontrack EZDrummer/Drumkit From Hell

This is the basic EZD interface.

Almost all of the downsides of Beatcraft are solved with DFH. It is not a standalone program. It is integrated into your DAW, so it is easy to make changes and hear them immediately. Generally speaking, MIDI is easier to edit than Beatcraft tracks. You can import MIDI tracks from GuitarPro/TuxGuitar files or other MIDI tracks into your drum track, which is useful if you want to create cover songs. Additionally, it has a lot of loops and fills included, so you don’t have to create everything by hand. Finally, it sounds very good and very realistic. This is a software instrument that plays samples. In this case, the samples are from Tomas Haake’s drumkit. You can hear it in action on the album Meshuggah -  Catch 33.

This is EZD loaded with the DFH expansion.

The details vary between DAWs. Additionally, some DAWs offer better MIDI editing capabilities. For instance, GarageBand is very simplistic in that it basically just allows you to copy MIDI events around. But Logic lets you select MIDI events in many different ways and process them arbitrarily, such as randomizing their velocities.