DeMidify vs EZdrummer 3: Humanizing Your Own Beats vs Library Grooves

EZdrummer 3 and DeMidify both promise drums that sound less like a machine, so they get compared a lot. But they come at the problem from opposite directions. EZdrummer is a complete drum production tool: it gives you the kit sounds and a library of grooves that real drummers played, and helps you build a song from them. DeMidify doesn't make any sound at all — it takes a drum pattern you programmed and makes it feel played. Which one you need depends mostly on one question: whose beat is it?

What EZdrummer 3 does

EZdrummer 3 is a paid drum production tool from Toontrack that runs as a plugin in your DAW (and as a standalone app). It combines two things that are hard to get elsewhere in one package: produced, mix-ready drum sounds and a large library of MIDI grooves recorded from drummers. Around that core, it offers tools for finding and arranging those grooves:

• Drum sounds: sampled kits you can play from any MIDI part, whether it comes from the library or from you.
• A large groove library of MIDI performances captured from drummers, covering many styles, with intros, verses, choruses, and fills.
• Bandmate: drop in an audio or MIDI file of another part — a guitar riff or bass line, say — and it suggests grooves from the library that fit it.
• Groove search to browse and filter the library for the kind of beat you're after.
• Song Track, a timeline for arranging grooves into a full song structure before you drag it into your DAW.
• A grid editor for editing the notes in a groove directly.

If you want drums that sound great and a human performance picked for you, EZdrummer is built for exactly that. The performances come from the library; your job is mostly choosing, arranging, and tweaking.

What DeMidify does

DeMidify is for a different starting point: you've already programmed your drums, the pattern is right, but it sounds stiff. You export the part from any DAW as a single MIDI file (.mid or .midi), upload it in your browser, and choose:

• A genre style: Rock, Pop, Funk, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Soul, Blues, Metal, Punk, Country, Reggae, Latin, Afrobeat, Gospel, or No preference.
• Humanization strength, from Subtle to Strong.
• Creative freedom, from Stay close (keep your pattern as written) to Reimagine (let the model take more liberties).

You get humanized MIDI back and play it through whatever drum instrument you like — including EZdrummer. There's no plugin to install, and DeMidify provides no drum sounds of its own.

Side by side

Starting point

• EZdrummer 3: a library groove chosen by you, or suggested by Bandmate.
• DeMidify: a drum MIDI file you wrote yourself.

Drum sounds

• EZdrummer 3: yes — that's a core part of the product.
• DeMidify: none. It outputs MIDI for your own sampler or kit.

Where the "human" comes from

• EZdrummer 3: grooves that were played by drummers and recorded as MIDI.
• DeMidify: an AI model that applies played feel to your pattern, guided by the genre style, strength, and creative freedom you pick.

Where it runs

• EZdrummer 3: installed on your computer, as a plugin or standalone.
• DeMidify: in a web browser, with MIDI from any DAW.

Cost

• EZdrummer 3: a paid Toontrack product.
• DeMidify: 14-day free trial, then $9.90/month, cancel anytime.

Which should you choose?

• Choose EZdrummer when you need drum sounds. DeMidify doesn't make any, so if you don't have a kit you're happy with, a drum instrument like EZdrummer comes first.
• Choose EZdrummer when you don't have a beat in mind and would rather pick from grooves that drummers already played. Browsing the library or letting Bandmate suggest grooves for your riff is a fast way to get there.
• Choose EZdrummer when you want to arrange a whole song's drums in one place with Song Track.
• Choose DeMidify when you've already written the drum part and it's specific to your song — a kick pattern that locks to your riff, a fill you hear in your head, a groove nobody else's library has.
• Choose DeMidify when you already own a drum sampler you like (any sampler) and the missing piece is feel, not sound.
• Choose DeMidify when you've heavily edited a library groove and it no longer feels like one continuous performance.

If library grooves already cover everything you need and you rarely program drums yourself, EZdrummer alone may be the better fit, and that's fine.

Using them together

Because DeMidify works on MIDI and EZdrummer plays MIDI, the two fit together naturally. Two workflows that make sense:

Edit a library groove, then humanize it

Library grooves are a great starting point, but songs rarely line up with them perfectly. You might move kicks to match a bass line, swap a fill, or cut a busy section down. Each hand edit is a note that wasn't part of the original performance, and a heavily edited groove can start to feel programmed again. Export the edited part, run it through DeMidify with Creative freedom set toward Stay close, and bring it back so your edits sit in the same played feel as the rest.

Program your own beat, play it through EZdrummer

If you prefer writing drums from scratch, program the pattern in your DAW, humanize it with DeMidify, then load the result onto an EZdrummer track. You keep your own part, get a human-feeling performance, and hear it through EZdrummer's kits.

The bottom line

EZdrummer 3 is a complete toolkit for great-sounding drums built from real drummers' grooves, and for many producers it's the center of their drum workflow. DeMidify is a focused tool for one job: taking drum MIDI you wrote yourself and giving it a played feel, without changing what makes it yours. They don't compete so much as sit next to each other in the chain — EZdrummer for sound and library grooves, DeMidify for the beats you program yourself.

EZdrummer is a trademark of Toontrack Music AB. DeMidify is not affiliated with Toontrack.