Battery

Introduction
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A great intuitive sampler specialized for drums including a lot of internal sound processing and warping features.
It's impossible to list all features and review them all. They're just too many :) I will concentrate my review to my workflow and just scratch the surface.

I'd give a 10/10, but unless they fix some little issues (see cons below) Battery 4 has to live with an 8/10.

GUi & Usability
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The GUI change from Batter 3 to 4 is huge and I love it. Editing start and end points is now much easier and faster. Loading samples and assigning them to a cell is a piece of cake. So is layering samples within a cell. Layered samples can be still tweaked separately for some important parameters like pitch, vol and pan.
The new file explorer is also faster and gives you the possibility to tag your own samples, so you can find them much faster, because you don't have to search them on your harddrive. Thus creating your own drum set is done quick and easy.

Processing and sound warping your samples within Battery 4 is straight forward and features a lot of different ways. You can even group cells on a bus and then tweak and process the bus internally.

Sound
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The sound depends heavily on the samples you use, of course. Battery 4 has basically no sound for itself, as long as you just play the samples. As soon as you start to process them it'll change. The inbuilt effects, compressors, filters, etc. are nice, but definitely not the best out there. That's why I route the sounds thru individual outs and process them in the DAW. But essentially you don't need that, in fact you'd be able to produce a whole song just with Battery 4. Everything's in there.

The samples sound very good and clean and come well tagged. The included library is huge and has its own sound character. I call it NI-character. It's a matter of taste. I personally don't like them and always use other sample libraries.

Presets
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It also comes with a lot of complete drum presets. The few ones I checked out are well programmed and include a lot of details. Personally I just love to create new sets from scratch. For newbies the presets are a very good starting point, where they also can learn the features of Battery 4.

Stability
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Battery 4 never crashed on my system (Logic 8 & OS X 10.6.8) and runs tight with 8 mono and 8 stereo individual outs. Some claim, that drums programmed with audio files on audio tracks are more tight and groovey than samplers (like Battery 4) triggered by MIDI. I did a test where the whole drum pattern was created twice with the exact same samples. Once only with audio files on audio tracks (what a hassle to set them and if you have to change the groove ;) ) and once with MIDI. Bounced both versions, switched the phase on one and they cancelled each perfectly out. So there was no difference at all.

Cons
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Here are some issues, that left me a little clueless because they were implemented in Battery 3 and then left out in Battery 4. But I have to tell that they are not a killer:
-) Saving presets in the envelopes is missing
-) Previewing samples in a cell without overwriting the original sample is missing
-) Individual out assignment is not possible directly at the cell fader, but have to be done via right click on the cell and thru 3 sub menus.

Conclusion
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Albeit the issues I use Battery 4 for all projects. It's fast, reliable and gives you a lot of features. I hope they will include the missing Battery 3 features in the future.