Battery 4 sucks in 2018?

[Aloysius]

B4 has a lot more to offer than just a pretty GUI. What about some of the stuff in B4 that's not in B3?

<copy and paste>

EFFECTS EVERYWHERE
BATTERY 4 delivers powerful on-board effects – SOLID EQ, SOLID BUS COMP, TRANSIENT MASTER, tape saturation, LoFi, and a powerful convolution reverb. Apply them to cells, groups of cells or to the master outs. Create chains, re-order effects, and sidechain with drag-and-drop ease on four busses and the master channel.

</copy and paste>

Does that really seem like a 'crippled version of B3' to you?

[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.

I never underestimate the laziness of developers, or the stupidity of product development priorities. Getting their priority features re-implemented, and then selling the product as "NEW!", very often results in the "lower priority" features never being completed. Especially at corporations that focus mostly on one product. If none of those features have been put back since 2014, then they're never going to do so and are clearly not interested in Battery anymore. What other explanation is there for dropping perfectly good workflow functions?

When I watched that video of lost features, I thought "those are exactly the kinds of workflow features that make a quality user experience... and now they're gone."

What a shame.

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).

I don't know all the details of Mashine, but I can tell NI are nearly 100% focused on it, so it seems obvious they're favoring Mashine over Battery. Crippling one product to favor another is foolish and arrogant. Mashine isn't remotely a product I'm interested in. I'm a musician with a perfectly usable DAW, not a "beatmaker" looking to play with loops in a schizophrenic tool that sells hardware (yet more hardware which is useless garbage should the software become unavailable).

I had Battery on my list of interests because it seemed like a good tool for creating unique drum kits, since I don't have such a tool with any kind of sensible workflow for samples (I hate Logic's UltraBeat; I'd love if Propellerhead Reason's Kong was an AudioUnit plugin... with a larger GUI). But now I know better about NI's thinking on Battery (very little thought). It's just going to keep me away from ever wasting my money on, and time learning, Battery.

Mashine helped kill Kore; next it will kill Battery?

Meh. My struggle with buggy-ass text selection in shitty-ass iOS Safari has made me much more irritated while typing this than I should be about this topic; sorry for the rant (not going to do any more editing; screw you, Apple; these bugs have been here since iOS 7 and never fixed!!!).

I was only really speculating. Who really knows their motivation? Either way, I never had a problem with B3, and i still don't with B4. Mind you, I was never a power user.

I still use them for their included kits, but I will likely sample the sounds into Geist 2 as it allows manipulation and processing on a whole other level

[CrystalWizard]

Battery3 is yesterday's news. move on.

No, it’s not. We’re discussing it here and now.

[noiseboyuk]

B4 has a lot more to offer than just a pretty GUI. What about some of the stuff in B4 that's not in B3?

<copy and paste>

EFFECTS EVERYWHERE
BATTERY 4 delivers powerful on-board effects – SOLID EQ, SOLID BUS COMP, TRANSIENT MASTER, tape saturation, LoFi, and a powerful convolution reverb. Apply them to cells, groups of cells or to the master outs. Create chains, re-order effects, and sidechain with drag-and-drop ease on four busses and the master channel.

</copy and paste>

Does that really seem like a 'crippled version of B3' to you?

Quite.

Battery three definitely had some plusses, but dismissing B4 as a crippled B3 with a fancy GUI is daft. The binary world of KVR opinion.

[Jace-BeOS]

I'm not dismissing it casually or with a "binary absolutist" mentality. I seriously find the workflow changes to be foolish. While learning about the version 3 workflow, I realized I've been missing out. But, wait, that workflow is gone in version 4, so I'm not missing out anymore.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

B4 has a lot more to offer than just a pretty GUI. What about some of the stuff in B4 that's not in B3?

<copy and paste>

EFFECTS EVERYWHERE
BATTERY 4 delivers powerful on-board effects – SOLID EQ, SOLID BUS COMP, TRANSIENT MASTER, tape saturation, LoFi, and a powerful convolution reverb. Apply them to cells, groups of cells or to the master outs. Create chains, re-order effects, and sidechain with drag-and-drop ease on four busses and the master channel.

</copy and paste>

Does that really seem like a 'crippled version of B3' to you?

Quite.

Battery three definitely had some plusses, but dismissing B4 as a crippled B3 with a fancy GUI is daft. The binary world of KVR opinion.

To clarify: I am not suggesting B4 is crippled, which is a relative term anyway. For my uses, I prefer B4, especially now that I know that I can bring the B3 libraries into B4.

[Sascha Franck]

Very late reply, but I managed to install Battery 3 under OSX High Sierra and it's also running as a plugin in Logic, wrapped inside ImageLines Minihost Modular (using the VST version, AU won't load, go figure, so much about Apples oh so superior format...). No idea about stability yet, I also won't get individual outs as it seems. Further, once you call up the GUI, it becomes a "super always on top" window (tabbing between programs won't make it disappear), but I'm fine with that. It's one of the plugins I really missed and so far I don't feel that Battery 4 would be after my taste (gonna have a look at that Komplete 12 update offer, though).

[Sascha Franck]

Uh-oh, Logic just crashed. Probably no good idea then...

[jancivil]

aaaaand Battery 3 simply cannot be activated under High Sierra here. not afaict... NOW it's time to move on.

[Aloysius]

... or use a proper computer.

[Sascha Franck]

aaaaand Battery 3 simply cannot be activated under High Sierra. NOW it's time to move on.

Battery 3 *is* activated on my Mac Pro running HS. Standalone works a treat, VST version too, as it seems - just the AU version doesn't. Activation wasn't a problem, though, shows up in both Native Access and Service Center.

[jancivil]

What did you do? Did you activate in Logic? Under Sierra, the standalone took me to SC of course, which didn't see it. NA was no help. In VE Pro, activate made SC see it. Now it doesn't. I have older NI stuff which is seen as VST in VE Pro but not the AU.

[jancivil]

I entered its serial number in NA but it informed me NI would get back with me, that routine
splash screen disagrees with itself on one salient point...
VE Pro 6 sees the AU but not the VST; Nuendo 8 doesn't see it (VST) either.

[Sascha Franck]

What did you do? Did you activate in Logic? Under Sierra, the standalone took me to SC of course, which didn't see it. NA was no help. In VE Pro, activate made SC see it. Now it doesn't. I have older NI stuff which is seen as VST in VE Pro but not the AU.

I think (don't exactly remember) it was like this:
- Fresh install (using the Google Drive downloads NI supplied, my installer disk #1 seems to be too scratched). Had to enter the serial during that already.
- Opened Native access. Showed Battery as activated already.
- Opened Battery standalone. Came up with the activate/demo/buy splash screen (huh?), I clicked activate, it opened Service Center and was showing up as activated, too (no further action required).
- Next standalone opening was without the splash screen.

I suspect that activation generally doesn't work through Service Center on High Sierra, only through NA. But Battery will need SC to activate. So you need to run NA first to tell HS it's authorized, and apparently that information can then be read out by SC, which in return will "inform" Battery that everything is ok now.

Fwiw, the AU doesn't show up in Logic at all. It does show up in ILs Minihost Modular (which is free for the time being, btw), but you can't load it. Fortunately the VST version shows up in Minihost as well, and you can load that. But Minihost itself is using too much CPU for what it is and the "always on top" nature of plugins running inside it is annoying. Also had one Logic crash already - but yesterday I fooled around for longer and things went well.
So it's working but it's pretty convoluted and I'm thinking about Battery 4 because there's really not much else to compete with it in a serious way. I need quick drag and drop of samples, ideally triggering of multiple cells from one input note (that's really something I miss with Ultrabeat) and ideally loop slicing/mapping in one convenient package. I know Battery is still lacking of the slicing part (why? It's based on Kontakts engine which supports slicing...), so I might better be off looking somewhere else (perhaps FXpansion Geist - but after the ROLI buyout I'm rather not betting on them to improve it any further).
Fwiw, Native Instruments' upgrade philosophy is quite funky. Battery 3 to 4: €99. Komplete 2/3/4 (the last update I did, I transported my music stuff from OSX.6.8 to HS just 1-2 weeks ago) to Komplete 12: €199. The latter being too much money atm, but it's rather strange and I'd be stupid to update just Battery.

[Wopelka]

I'd like to start using Battery 4, which I got with Komplete years ago. For that, I would be grateful if someone could explain how, in FL Studio, it is possible to have the names of each sample pad appearing in the piano roll. With most similar plugins it works automatically, but not with B4, which is very annoying et prevents me to ever use it.