Sokratis, that's great that you can do that (is it custom software, or can you now do User Audio Styles including the melodic stuff now on the Audya, and how easy is the software to use?), but that seems such a convoluted, second hand way of doing it...

Rather than the kit be in the arranger, you have to do it all in a DAW, chop it up into its component parts, transfer it to the arranger, reassemble it, rinse and repeat for EVERY change you want to make. With a MIDI kit in the arranger, want to move a beat around, change a swing value, drop a hit, presto! Done.

The thing is, many of our modern MIDI arrangers are starting to go this way. Most Roland kits in the new BK series have snares up to four layers deep. Many of the sounds are four layers, some are three or two, a few are still just the one. But this equates to drum grooves that are MUCH more dynamic than they used to be (especially as Roland samples a little bit of room into the samples - nowhere NEAR as ambient as Yamaha have made their audio loops, though!). Combine this with the Dynamic Arranger feature (play harder or softer on the keyboard, the Style Parts get a bit more or less velocity offsets) and you are starting to get something that sounds quite 'live'... (BTW, can't do THAT with a loop!)

All we need now is for the kits to go say eight layers deep, and the improvement will be astounding. No real need for the 48 snare layers that BFD gives us (although that would be nice!). But things are already quite good (the drum shootout we had had Roland's BK kits compared quite favorably with Ketron's loops) with just four layers on the main drums. Eight on it ALL would probably do the trick.

Plus, eight layers would allow 'round robin' triggering of layers (if you send say 100 velocity for every hit of a particular drum, which quite a few really old legacy styles do, the player alternates between adjacent sample layers, so you don't get that 'machine gun' effect) and much more subtle playing.

While it's great that Ketron's CAN import 3rd party audio loops to make styles, I think simply upping the detail in the kits we already HAVE is the simpler solution, allowing us to all edit our styles without resorting to a convoluted way of preparing custom audio loops... You know how simple we arranger players like things!

Again I agree with you Diki....
It is indeed extremely difficult and quite complicated method to make a audio style ...
Require too much knowledge DAW, audio mix, very good Hradware and Software equipment, and maybe prohibitive for the average user.....
But now in cooperation with AJ, we will try to do new Audio Style library, to extendable the factory pallets..
I think that will be very important to someone can have continuously new Audio Styles.
I agree also with you that the sound engine of Audya (design, and possibilities) is very very poor.... We can not to make a new Drums kit with User samples (too bad), or if we want to make a user sound (with multisamples) the MSP file is very poor also....
The INS file (multisamples, and Drums kit) is very good, but it can to create only Ketron Italy...
My opinion is that the Pa3x (i have it) is perhaps the best for this work....
Very very good sound engine (DNC) with too much posibilities....
One year before, I had recorded in a famous Studio of Greece and in all Balkans (Studio Sierra) http://www.sierrastudios.gr/page17/page18/page18.html a new classic Drums kit (Yamaha 9000) to we use in a new Greek Korg USB, that i am working....
Here is the video of Studio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-pQmHWTf2s
So... With Pa3x,we have very good possibilities to create a good Drums Kit...
Here https://soundcloud.com/sokratis-1974/musicorama-pa3x-final-sierra is the demo of New Drums kit that we recorded in Studio Sierra, and I play with Pa3x... The Snare Drums, is different here but all kit is from Yamaha 9000...
Thanks.

There's a lesson to be learned from all this...

DON'T CLOSE OFF YOUR ARRANGER! Ketron, Yamaha, are you listening?

If you are going to go down this audio loop road, there's basically NO WAY you can anticipate what grooves and rhythms and styles your users need. So, making it EASY for users to put their own grooves in is part of the decision to go down this non-traditional arranger route.

Otherwise, you end up having a 'potentially' great feature that, in practice, turns out to be only for those who are content with the factory audio styles (and content that anything they want that isn't in there will sound poor in comparison). In Yamaha's case this means all that effort spent on a mere 10% of the content. This route, to change completely how you have done drum tracks after decades of MIDI kits, is basically an 'all or nothing' trap.

If the audio styles don't utterly blow the MIDI ones away, what's the point? And if they DO, all the styles need audio drums. And that's where allowing 3rd party style makers and technically savvy users access to the tools to be able to make THEIR OWN! Because you, to be honest, don't have the time or money to flood your users with the myriad different needs they all have, from Balkan folk/pop musics to crunk to zydeco. You can't do it all... let US do the rest!

Diki...
I agree 100% with you!!!!!....