Being a fairly new Logic user, one of the first things that surprised me about Logic was that for DAW with so many fab synths, most of the bundled EXS24 patches were...well...more synths. This brings me to my first question: What's the quality of the sample patches like in the Jam Packs. For example, In the rhythm Section Pack are the electric basses as good as those you'd get with Spectrasonics Trilogy - are the acoustic drum kits convincing? Secondly, I'd like to be able to 'break open' my Reason Refills and map these samples across my EXS24. I have heard of a free app called either Refill Unpacker or Refill Viewer that allows you to to extract the samples but I can't seem to find it anywhere on the Web. Any deas? Thanks in advance, Simon (London UK)

I don't have much experience with trilogy ... I tested it a year or so ago, but that was the limit of my experience. I do have all of the Jam packs. They are typically well produced, at 44.1 kHz 16-bit. I would recommend them, but also caution that with a product like the jam packs, everbody has them, so you're not getting anything unique. I love listening to the jam pack sounds in TV commercials these days ... in fact, there's an "oil of olay" commercial that directly lifted some of the jam pack loops I used in "The Apple Pro Training Series: Logic Pro 6" book ... At the risk of self-promoting, if you want more unique loops, go to our sister site: [url]http://www.audioBase.com[/url] [b]The main benefit of the Jam packs are the extra sample-based instruments you get[/b] ... for example, your instrument presets for all of the garageband instruments will increase every time you instal a jam pack ... in the case of the "drum Kits" instrument, this is REALLY useful ... probably worth the price of the jam pack alone.

Hi Simon, When I switched to Mac I bought the jampacks to use with garageband before I decided to shell out for Logic Pro. To be honest, I think they are O.K, but there is a slight issue with some of the levels in the orchestral instruments (way to high) but that is not a biggy. As Martin said, the loops are everywhere. East West put out some massive libraries of Apple Loops and REX files which IMHO are of a higher quality than the Jampacks with huge variety.

[quote:2739]As Martin said, the loops are everywhere.[/quote] Yeah, it's like in the 90s when we used to play that fun game called "spot the preset" where you trainspot synth presets in songs ... these days it's "spot the jam pack loop" ... they really are everywhere.

Answer: Make your own loops!

I think maybe people are slightly missing the point: I'm not interested in the loops (I don't use other peoples loops in my music) I thought my reference to Trilogy would make it clear that it was the sampler instruments that I was asking about - but obviously not.