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User Reviews for Battery
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By johndale
On 27th December 2006
Version: 3.1
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johndale
5 of 7 people found
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I have been using Battery since version 1. Battery 3 was not ready for "Primetime" when released and still is not. Over 20 verifiable bugs NI is aware of. So far they have done nothing to remedy the situation. Support does not return emails, they just send you spam on buying more of there products.I do not recommend this upgrade until the product is fixed. Then it should be a great piece of software. The features (once they work) will make it the best drum sampler out there bar none. The fact that Battery 3 does both audio and MIDI loops is a godsend, for that "perfect" drum track and the per cell effects are excellent, in both tonal quality and CPU load. But as I stated, hold off on this one until they get it right.NI have been developing a reputation for poor support for a few years now. Well with Battery 3 they are expanding on that reputation. I am a Battery user and feel it is the best on the market. It is really sad we waited so long for an update and this is what the loyal users receive. |
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By AnotherBob
On 29th March 2004
Version: 1
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AnotherBob
2 of 2 people found
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Battery was my first VSTi dedicated to drums and still the one I use most. It is stable, sounds good and comes with a nice selection of sampled sets. The expansion sets are wonderful and I suggest them for anyone. The expansion sets also work in Kontakt. Two complaints that I frequently here about batter is lack of synth modules, and no dedicated outputs. I don’t mind the absence of synth modules because I consider some dedicated drum synths to be much better than what you get in an all in one package. The absence of extra outputs is a bigger problem is you want to process bass drum separately from the rest of the kit. My way around this has been to separate the bass drum to a second instance of batters. This can be done in the beginning, or when you reach the point of finalizing the mix. One of my favorite features in Battery is the ability to use drag and drop within some hosts. In Sonar I can drag slices from some VSTi’s that chop up loops directly to pads in Battery. This is a quick way to build some unique kits by chopping up everything from turntable scratch loops to machinery rhythms. Battery does not stream so some kits can take a lot of space. One the other hand, I have noticed that some programs that convert Battery kits to work in other drum VSTi’s seem to greatly increase the size of the kits, and thus those VSTi’s use even more memory when using Battery kits.
The one big problem with Battery is the advertised Akai conversion. I have never been able to get a decent conversion. In the worst case the conversion process will lock up the computer. I have tried this on 5 different computers of different brands, Windows operating systems, and CD Drives. No luck. It will just not work for me.
User Interface - Functional but nothing special to look at.
Sound - Very good.
Documentation - A book is included in the box.
Presets - A selection of nice kits, but I suggest getting the expansions.
Customer Support - Good but updates to Battery have been very slow. No answer or solution to the problem of Akai import.
Value For The Money - More expensive than the two main competitors.
Stability - Good as long as you do not try the Akai import routine on Windows.
Copy Protection - Occasional CD check.
Frequency Of Use - Very often.
CPU Load - Light.
Fun Factor - Easy to create fun and interesting kits.
With the release of Kontakt I am not sure I would buy Battery again. |
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By multree
On 4th June 2003
Version: 1.0.1.5.
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multree
2 of 3 people found
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Well I tested both Battery and DR-008 and decided to go with Battery for the GUI simply looks better and has all the features I need.
It's a superb drumsampler but I use it for other samples, too. For example I considered to switch to Pro Tools LE which only supports RTAS Plugins. Now I have the lovely M-Tron (which isn't supporting RTAS) and Battery witch will support RTAS (september 2003). It's so easy to recompile the tape banks for Battery and play them in Pro Tools.....*gg*
Making own sample banks is very intuitive, too.
But back to the original features. The supplied drumkits are very good and offer a large variety of sounds (most are not very big and have less layers on each hit then let's say DFH - which is a good addition btw) but they sound good.
The best imho are: 70's Funk (which I used in 'Longing for hotter days'), Vintage, Steveland's Vinyl Kit (this sounds gorgeous), Jazz and REAKTOR..... but the other's are good, too. and you can even take single cells from different kits and combine them to one.
the only bad thing I gotta say... is the way the layers can be edited..... for it's not graphically.. and sometimes difficult.
BTW: the custumer support is pretty good.... they even have updates which are not on their homepage... you just gotta drop them a mail.
All in all it was definitely worth my money. |
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By ericj23
On 14th February 2003
Version: 1.014
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ericj23
0 of 3 people found
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i decided to try out the demo of dr-008 after reading the review below. Please ignore this guy - the list of things the dr-008 can't do with comparison to battery is massive (samplestart, number of loops, pitch of a batch of multisamples etc.)
OK Dr-008 has a few synths on it for making drum sounds and they are OK and i think some of its samplers are OK for mangling one shot samples BUT
Battery is for playing large sample driven banks using multiple layers - and dr-008 does a pitifull job of this - Battery does it perfectly
PS If you wanna drum synth - waldorf attack has more variation and can be played as full synth too |
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By lucille
On 12th February 2003
Version: 2.0
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lucille
1 of 1 people found
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I'm a long time Redrum devotee but as I started using
fruity more and more I really needed a vsti drum
sampler. The market is not terribly competitive, with
DR 008 and Battery being the two main opitons.
I found DR 008 incredible ugly and unintuitive, but
it is well liked on this forum. As for battery:
gui: basically good, oversized, and the 1 color
flashing hit light would have been a bit more tasteful.
I think this would be a better instrument with 10-
20 cells.(there are 54)
sounds: 20 very nice kits, i would have a liked real
808/909 kit instead of the more generic '80's drums';
but these sounds are around. Particularly nice is the
reactor kit, with lots of funky noises. The accoustic
kits are nice. I did not notice any multilayer patches,
but I really haven't had it long.
sound quality: How can you f*ck up a drum sampler?--
oh yeah--Reason. No funky gain/grain issues here.
One big thumbs up; try the demo...Battery consisitantly crashed Sonar when I tried to create a custom drum map. |
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