Trigger 2 is one of the better-known drum replacement plugins. The difference between the two comes down to one question: what do your drum tracks look like before the plugin loads?
Trigger 2 is a per-track replacer. You put it on a close-mic'd kick, snare, or tom track, and it swaps in samples. That assumes you have the multitracks, with each drum mostly isolated on its own channel.
ReStem 2 starts one step earlier. It separates a mixed drum recording into seven stems, whether that's a stereo bus, a room mic, or an old bounce, and then replacement, gating, shaping, and MIDI happen on the stems. Without multitracks, a per-track replacer has nothing to grab onto. That's the situation ReStem was built for.
| ReStem 2 Pro | Trigger 2 Platinum | |
|---|---|---|
| Works on a mixed or stereo drum recording | ✓ | Needs isolated tracks |
| Separates the kit into stems | ✓ seven stems | — |
| Sample replacement | ✓ Drumagog engine, kick & snare | ✓ kick, snare, toms |
| Bundled sample library | Works with Drumagog gog files & your samples | ✓ large included library |
| MIDI output | ✓ every stem, live or exported, with velocity | ✓ live capture, host-dependent |
| Tom pitch & hi-hat articulation sorting | ✓ Auto Notes | — |
| Per-stem gate & transient tools | ✓ | — |
| ARA2 timeline processing | ✓ | — |
| Standalone app | ✓ | — |
| Price | $199 one-time ($99 Core) | Around $120, often on sale |
Details checked August 2026. Versions and prices change, so please verify before you decide.
On clean multitracks, Trigger 2 does what it promises: it swaps samples with low latency, and it comes with a sample library. That library is geared toward the big, polished drum sounds of metal and heavy rock — if that's the sound you're chasing, it might work well for you. If your sessions always arrive as multitracks and all you want is to swap drum sounds, it may be all you need.
A per-track replacer is blind to anything it can't isolate. A stereo loop, a board mix, or a bounced session gives it nothing to work with, and it has no answer for hi-hats or cymbals. ReStem separates first, so those recordings become workable, and the stems it doesn't replace can still be gated, shaped, remixed, or sent out as MIDI.
ReStem's replacement engine is Drumagog, which we've been building for more than twenty years. It swaps or blends samples on the kick and snare stems, aligned to the original hit, with the multi-layer dynamics that made gog files a studio standard — a bias, from the start, toward keeping the drummer audible in the result. And because it runs after separation, it works even when the kick started life buried in a stereo mix.
Both plugins can turn hits into MIDI. ReStem does it per stem, from a mixed recording, and keeps up with blast beats and ghost rolls. Auto Notes sorts toms by pitch and tells open, closed, and pedal hi-hats apart, live on the insert or as an exported file.
If your sessions arrive as clean multitracks and you're after that big, polished, sample-forward sound — or tom replacement is on your list — Trigger 2 costs less and may be enough. If you ever work from mixed drums, want the kit on faders, need MIDI with articulations sorted, or you'd rather blend a sample with the original hit than swap it outright, that's the territory ReStem and its Drumagog engine were built for.
No. Trigger 2 needs each drum mostly isolated on its own track. Splitting a mixed recording into stems is the core of what ReStem 2 does.
Yes. The Drum Replacer loads Drumagog gog files with their multi-layer dynamics, and MIDI Output can trigger any sampler you own, which covers everything else.
Sure. Some engineers separate with ReStem, drag the stems onto tracks, and run their usual replacement chain on the results. Once the stems exist, every tool you own works on them.
Seven days, the full Pro feature set. Try it on a stereo drum bounce and hear the kit come apart.