Battery 4 sucks in 2018?

[hesnotthemessiah]

There were several features that were removed in Battery 4. This video covers them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxcf5oMhNlA

One of the things that really pissed me off was the removal of several kits that could be used for composing, such as ethnic kits. I have both 3 and 4 installed, and I use both.

4 has the advantage in that, as mentioned, a lot of people make kits for it (including NI itself in its Expansions series).

Wow!! I am amazed that NI have released Battery 4 with all of these features missing. These are all major features. Really major features. Someone from NI really needs to explain why these Battery 3 features were missing from the original Battery 4 release....and are still missing now. I definitely will not be "upgrading". I use Battery 3 a lot. Love it's interface - so well designed. It allows me to build and edit my own kits with minimum of fuss. It has just the right amount of features that I need to edit my sounds. It's automation and modulation system is great.

[yellowmix]

Anyone using Kontact??
I've tried but just not feeling it! Battery is so uncomplicated it allows you to move fast and remain creative!

I'll use Kontakt for acoustic kits that have lots of round-robins. Round-robin is supported in Battery, it's just cumbersome when you have a lot. It is remarkable how powerful Battery is but scaled back just enough to make it fast. I can get a drum rack going in no time and tweak it as needed. Kontakt for me is clearly divided between instrument/multi creation and actually using it.

Looking at what changed from Battery 3, the only thing that bothers me is in-kit preview but thinking about it, would it apply the same processing as the existing samples or play it dry? Both are kinda useless to me. What I've been doing is loading a candidate in another cell, processing it, and swapping the cells around to A/B it.

[martinjuenke]

Alright, I‘ve reinstalled Battery 3 from NI support page (threw away my old DVDs stupidly after upgrading), have now all acoustic and ethnic kits again and found my MIDI example files again in these approx. 10 GB.

Thanks especially to electro for giving advice!

The new killer hit with lots of vibrating percussion is on its way...

Back to topic:
Nothing sucks with Battery!

[codec_spurt]

Battery 3 and Battery 4 are very different instruments.

Battery 3 is probably all the drum machine and library you will need. It can manipulate any drum sample in most of the ways you would wish to, quite quickly. It's also got a decent 12GB library that they don't give you with B4.

Not a big fan of the Green, but there you go.

Love the B4 Gui, but it's a different thing.

I got a spare license for Battery 3. I got it with my Komplete 7 as well so don't need the license I bought earlier. No rush. Not even sure how much to sell it for.

Battery 3 is a powerhouse of drum goodness. It's not pretty, but it does the job. The included library is pretty good too. Both synthetics and real stuff.

In fact, I went a little wild with it. I made up my own 4GB library for it. It includes rips from David Sylvian albums, all kinds of stuff. Mapped. I'll throw that in to the lucky buyer of my B3. When I sell.

You can really go hog wild making up patches in B3. It's addictive.

You may know that I was a big hold out for NI stuff. But when I jumped in, I did it big time. Battery 3 was the gateway drug.

Having said that, Battery 4 is probably all that any sane man needs.

[Jace-BeOS]

Having said that, Battery 4 is probably all that any sane man needs.

What about insane robots?

[Kevin63101]

+1 for B3 as preferred for me

I have both versions, respect for B4 for electronic hit mangling. Some basics like undo missing is baffling.

I use B3 the most - primarily for creating huge custom acoustic drum kits with 3rd party multisample libraries I mix and match. The depth of B3 still blows my mind.

One major thing B3 can do not possible with B4: kontakt can play B3 files (entire kits). It's messy and primitive looking, but I still create incredibly deep round robin single drum pieces (snare, hi hat, toms) mapped in B3, then open in kontakt 5 as multis. In other words, I open many B3 kits in kontakt simultaneously to create a kontakt kit. This allows me to easily swap out a snare or kick of any type. For me it's very useful as I have my own unorthodox method of mapping for keyboard drum playing.

Long live B3.

[Kevin63101]

Another comment: NI obviously ditched battery as it's go to solution for acoustic drums when they created B4 update. But kontakt isn't as easy to create kits from scratch (eg from multisampled multivelocity wavs in roundrobin) for the novice user as B3 is. Maybe kontakt 6 will have better tools for those home users to create drum kits from wavs like this. Hope so.

[EnGee]

The good thing (actually the best thing!) that NI did is it has released a 64bit version of Battery 3

[Dewdman42]

Most of the things mentioned in the video seem like they would be easy enhancements to b4

[Jace-BeOS]

Most of the things mentioned in the video seem like they would be easy enhancements to b4

Agreed. That's another reason why it reeks of "new GUI development losses". They probably spent a lot of developer time recreating the GUI's basics from scratch, only to lose steam in the last 10% of the job (often regarded as 90% of the work) and push Battery 4 to market prematurely, without finishing all the finer details.

[Jace-BeOS]

In fact, finding out that those really sensible features from Battery 3 were dropped from Battery 4 has greatly lowered my interest in Battery. I hate buying-in on something that's a lazy/rushed rewrite of something superior that was available previously.

[fedexnman]

Kinda like a banana split with no bananas .

[CrystalWizard]

IMO Battery does not suck in the least. I prefer (and more often use) B3 over B4.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

They probably spent a lot of developer time recreating the GUI's basics from scratch, only to lose steam in the last 10% of the job (often regarded as 90% of the work) and push Battery 4 to market prematurely, without finishing all the finer details.

I don't think it has anything to do with being rushed-to-release. Were that the case, they could have easily re-introduced these features in the years since release.

Maybe they wanted to maintain a larger feature divide between Maschine and Battery (This assumes these features are present in Maschine, which is something I can't claim to know).

[jancivil]

Alright, I‘ve reinstalled Battery 3 from NI support page (threw away my old DVDs stupidly after upgrading), have now all acoustic and ethnic kits again and found my MIDI example files again in these approx. 10 GB.

I was mystified by this, but finally I found this {NI} page:
Where-Can-I-Download-the-BATTERY-3-Installer-?

Notes as to OSX: the page indicates not supported past 10.10.
What that means here (10.12.6) is:
1) It doesn't show in Native Access. I entered S/N there and it indicated it was activated. Ran standalone; it was not.
2) Service Center was useless from the standalone 'Activate' (and additionally believes two things which are activated are not. Battery 3 never showed in it).
3) Nuendo 8.2 blacklisted it.
3b) I opened it in VE Pro 6 (NB: 64-bit server) and Service Center now played ball. I can use it here.