If you’re a music producer, you should have heard of Playbeat by now. A creative groove engine that’s capable of generating perpetually evolving drum patterns through advanced musical algorithms, it’s swiftly becoming the tool of choice for any producer or musician looking to create original and unique drum grooves that bring a touch of variety to their beats and productions.
With their recent release of Playbeat 3.0, Audiomodern radically transformed their flagship drum software, bringing a host of new functions and features that have confirmed its status as the most powerful plugin of its kind. Perhaps the most exciting of these features is the ability to create and import custom packs of presets and sounds. With the introduction of this capability, Playbeat has instantly become an impressive collaborative tool, and offered a new way for creators to share their ideas while potentially making money, too.
Let’s take a look at how this works. In Playbeat’s Presets and Packs window, there’s options available to browse existing packs, import new packs, and create your own. Existing packs from other creators can be imported with just a few easy clicks from this window, thanks to Playbeat’s customised file format, .pbpack, in which sounds, samples, patterns, settings and metadata are organised and stored.
Music makers can also create their own packs, which can then be saved, exported, distributed or sold. Once you have presets created and saved in Playbeat that you’re happy with, this is as easy as hitting the Create New Pack option, selecting an image file to use as artwork, choosing a name and description, then dragging and dropping your presets into the pack. Then, hit the export button to save your pack as a .pbpack file to your hard drive.
The awesome thing about Playbeat’s new Packs manager is that it allows music makers to share what they’ve created in Playbeat with the world. This means that you and your collaborators can link up and share your Playbeat packs to work on the same grooves, with the same sounds and presets, with ease. It also gives you the ability to make money from your creations, by producing, distributing and selling your Playbeat packs online - this is a genius way to monetize music production that the new generation of Playbeat has made available to creators.
Following this update, Audiomodern have continued to expand Playbeat’s creative potential by releasing additional packs for creators to download and use in their own beats and productions. Visit their website to download packs, purchase Playbeat and find out more about the new features available in version 3.0.