I don't know if this is a well-known procedure, but I finally found a solution to a very annoying problem in Battery and I thought I'd share my knowledge.

Well, the problem is that when you alter an existing drum kit and save it, Battery also creates a new sample subfolder (with the name of the kit) and copies duplicates of all the original samples into that folder. If you create many variation of one master kit, this results in a massive waste of disk space. So, it would be much nicer if all variations of a kit point to the same original master sample folder. Unfortunately, there's no option like "save kit file only" in Battery.

The solution is to edit the .kit-File manually in the following way. Say your original drumkit is C:\Battery\XYdrums.kit and the samples are located in the folder C:\Battery\XYdrums\.

1. Save your varied kit as, say, C:\Battery\Zdrums.kit. Battery now copies all original samples in a newly created folder C:\Battery\Zdrums\
2. Open the C:\Battery\Zdrums.kit file with a text editor (e.g. notepad)
3. Replace all occurences of the string

(including the ' " ') by the string

In our case

4. Delete the newly created sub folder C:\Battery\Zdrums

Battery will now find the samples for the altered kit in the original folder.

Seems complicated, but it only takes a minute to do. Hope this helps.

Fette Töle

What you could do as well is to save your variations as .fxp/.fxb files, and the samples won't be duplicated.

Battery can hold up to 8 programs (.fxp) in RAM and those can be saved as a Bank (.fxb) - as long as your host supports it. Also, if you load the same Kit more than once, the samples won't be duplicated in RAM.