XLN's Addictive Trigger is known for hit detection that copes with bleed-heavy close mics better than classic threshold triggers. Both tools fight bleed; they just fight it in fundamentally different ways.
Addictive Trigger answers bleed with recognition. It learns what your snare sounds like, picks its hits out of a messy close mic, and plays a sample in their place. The original track stays as tangled as ever, and it works one drum per track.
ReStem answers bleed with separation. The kit comes apart into seven stems, so the bleed isn't worked around, it's removed onto its own faders. Replacement then becomes one option among several: gate, reshape, remix, replace with Drumagog, or send any stem out as MIDI.
| ReStem 2 Pro | Addictive Trigger | |
|---|---|---|
| Works on a mixed or stereo drum recording | ✓ | Needs isolated tracks |
| Separates the kit into stems | ✓ seven stems | — |
| Handles bleed by | Removing it onto separate stems | Detecting through it |
| Sample replacement | ✓ Drumagog engine, kick & snare | ✓ one drum per instance |
| MIDI output | ✓ every stem, live on the insert or exported | ✓ exported from detected hits |
| Tom pitch & hi-hat articulation sorting | ✓ Auto Notes | — |
| Per-stem gate & transient tools | ✓ | — |
| Live separation while the track plays | ✓ | — |
| ARA2 timeline processing | ✓ | — |
| Price | $199 one-time ($99 Core) | $149 list, often on sale |
Details checked August 2026. Versions and prices change, so please verify before you decide.
Setup really is quick. SuperStart configures detection by listening to the track, and on difficult close mics it locks on with less fiddling than most. It also plugs straight into XLN's Addictive Drums sounds. For one-drum-per-track replacement, it's a polished tool.
Recognition can find a hit, but it can't give you the drum. There's no way to hear the snare by itself, no fader for the hi-hat, and nothing to do with the bleed except hope the replacement covers it. And when the source is a stereo loop or a mixed bounce, there's no track to put the plugin on at all.
Addictive Trigger drags detected hits out as a MIDI file, which works well for the track it sits on. ReStem generates MIDI per stem from the whole kit, with velocity, keeps up with blast beats and ghost rolls, and Auto Notes sorts toms by pitch and hi-hats into open, closed, and pedal. It also works live on the insert, not only as an export.
A typical session stacks a gate here, a replacer there, and a separate MIDI pass. ReStem folds the chain into one window, per stem, latency-compensated. In ARA2 hosts it processes right on the timeline with one press of PROCESS.
If your sessions are clean multitracks and you live in Addictive Drums, Addictive Trigger will serve you well for less money. If your drums ever arrive mixed, or you want the actual instruments on faders and MIDI with sorted articulations, that's ReStem's job. The free trial settles it fastest.
It's designed for one drum per track. Its detection tolerates bleed on a close mic, but it can only output the one drum it's watching for. Splitting a full mix into stems is what ReStem 2 was built around.
ReStem sidesteps most of what makes detection hard, because each detector listens to an already-separated stem instead of a bleed-filled mic. On very dense material, the Best offline mode is there for exactly that.
Yes. MIDI Output drives any instrument that accepts MIDI, including Addictive Drums, live or through an exported file.
Seven days, the full Pro feature set. Hear your kit on seven faders, then decide.