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!