First need is a drum sampler to go with my soft synths and live guitar tracks.

A second need is a general-purpose sampler.

Being a relatively newbie, I'm having a tough time figuring out what Battery would give me that Kontakt wouldn't!?

As I might end up with Kontakt as a general purpose sampler anyway, what is the advantage of going with Battery for drums? I'll probably pick-up Synthetic Drums to use with one or the other.

Thanks,
Mike

i own both and haven't touched battery since i got kontakt. i like using kontakt's file browser a lot and i really need filters when making drums. battery lacks that.

so i suggest going the kontakt route. synthetic drums are ill too.

Still undecided which to get. I can only afford one or the other right now.

Dezai likes Kontakt better. But then I've heard from others that Kontakt is a bit "cludgier" if you're only doing drums. While I won't only be drums, that's 90% of what I'm going to do in the near-term.

Surely there's more of you out there that have experience with both these packages!?

kontakt is a much more powerful tool. if you are going to buy a sampler down the road anyway why not get kontakt now. it does everything that battery can do and a whole lot more.

that being said i still use battery all the time because of how easy it is to use and how stable it is. it is abolutely perfect for one shots of the drum variety.

I love Kontakt to bits. If you want a dedicated drum sampler, I'd go for DR-008. Me, I use Kontakt for drums.

battery has, IMHO, the best interface of a drum sampler - Dr-oo8 and RmIV are both good too - but ultimately its about having a visual representation of everything you need right in front of you

Kontakt is an incredibly powerful sampler that I have always found obscure and fiddely to use BUT the results are excellent

So if your just using samples which dont need disk streaming or beat slicing id think about battery