Native Instruments file for insolvency...

[bermudagold]

In the drum sampler threads and convos, I've always found it surprising groove agent doesn't come up much...

I own Steinberg's Absolute Package - and I loathe their heineous UIs. Tiny buttons and menus all over the places.
I might be able to kinda get along with Groove Agent, though - if only I could map MIDI notes to pads freely, but that's not possible. It's always been a central part of how I was working with Battery.
Might not be as much as an annoyance in case I could see more than 16 pads at a time, but that's not possible, either.

yeah groove agent UI is definitely old school and dense IDE like...much like halion...people either like em or they hate em...doesn't seem to be much middle ground
maybe give armory a spin


https://www.stagecraftsoftware.com/products/armory/

[sellyoursoul]

Battery is stuck in 1080p land, along with a ton of other NI plugins. It's unbelievable that a company would do that, but there it is.

One overlooked drum machine is Kong, which has been locked up in Reason for I think 15 years. And I guess now that the Reason rack plugin is available standalone, it's somewhat unlocked. I'm not aware of any drum machine plugin that has Kong's range of features, not to mention the well done UI. One thing I think Propellerhead should have done is included full sampled kits of some staple classic drum machines, but Kong has enough tools (and some samples) for approximating them any way.

[bermudagold]

One overlooked drum machine is Kong, which has been locked up in Reason for I think 15 years. And I guess now that the Reason rack plugin is available standalone, it's somewhat unlocked. I'm not aware of any drum machine plugin that has Kong's range of features, not to mention the well done UI. One thing I think Propellerhead should have done is included full sampled kits of some staple classic drum machines, but Kong has enough tools (and some samples) for approximating them any way.

whoah...i didnt know about kong...looks a pretty impressive stock drum designer...combined with all the other samplers in reason looks like reason users have a lot of ways to skin the cat

[Sascha Franck]

maybe give armory a spin

Been looking at it already. Doesn't look like a serious contender. Besides, there seem to be zero YT videos from them introducing it, which is kinda suspicious already.

[bermudagold]

maybe give armory a spin

Been looking at it already. Doesn't look like a serious contender. Besides, there seem to be zero YT videos from them introducing it, which is kinda suspicious already.

he's been around for a long time...solid resume...worked for big companies in industry...for some reason his personal lines have never got much visibility...i'd be skeptical of using youtube as a metric...lotta good stuff, especially older stuff youtubers dont touch

[Sascha Franck]

Fwiw, I may open up a dedicated thread, but the key features I want from a drum sampler plugin are these:

- In context preview. TAL-Drum wins here. But ideally it'd be as in Battery 3 where you could preview with and without parameters, which was most excellent (so the preview would in- or exclude, say, a filter already active on the pad).

- Editing of multiple cells simultaneously. Both TAL-Drum and Speeddrum do that.

- Decent amount of tweaking options per cell. Envelopes, filters, EQs, saturation and then some.

- Modwheel modulation support. Unfortunately, this is where Speedrum falls short for now (there's just plain 1:1 control via MIDI CCs).

- ReCycle in a plugin. Hence slicing, slice mapping and MIDI-to-DAW drag'n'drop. I know, Battery doesn't offer it, which annoyed me a lot. So I want this now. TAL-Drum can do it all with ease, Speedrum not yet (according to the developer it's coming with the next update).

- Ideally some easy "humanize" functions. This is where Speeddrum is great. Allows you to "un-machinize" pretty much any pattern in seconds.

- Ideally at least delay and reverb bus effects so I don't always need to start with multiout instances in case all I want is a tad of reverb on a snare. Very unfortunately, TAL-Drum doesn't offer any such FX.

Anything else (such as onboard step sequencers) are possibly nice to have but not relevant.
In fact, if there still was Battery 3, I'd use it for the rest of my life, even without a loop slicer.

[Sascha Franck]

he's been around for a long time...solid resume...worked for big companies in industry...for some reason his personal lines have never got much visibility...i'd be skeptical of using youtube as a metric...lotta good stuff, especially older stuff youtubers dont touch

Well, I've got some Stagecraftsoftware installed - two synths were available for free recently. Not impressed, the UIs are very tough to deal with. But I'll give Armory the benefit of a doubt and demo it.

[Sascha Franck]

Didn't even need 5 minutes to realize that Armory isn't even in the vicinity of the ballpark. Uninstalled.

[sellyoursoul]

One overlooked drum machine is Kong, which has been locked up in Reason for I think 15 years. And I guess now that the Reason rack plugin is available standalone, it's somewhat unlocked. I'm not aware of any drum machine plugin that has Kong's range of features, not to mention the well done UI. One thing I think Propellerhead should have done is included full sampled kits of some staple classic drum machines, but Kong has enough tools (and some samples) for approximating them any way.

whoah...i didnt know about kong...looks a pretty impressive stock drum designer...combined with all the other samplers in reason looks like reason users have a lot of ways to skin the cat

Propellerhead were on a nice peak in that era. Kong, Thor, Pulverizer, The Echo, integrating audio. Most of what came after that was adding new RE devices to their store, while adding less interesting devices to Reason. And Reason has a lot of very old devices that could use major updates. NN-XT is Reason's most powerful sampler, for example, but it's stayed pretty well the same since v1 with no major changes other than getting live sampling added after audio recording was integrated. It's still a capable straight-up sampler, not requiring any scripting to build detailed instruments, but I wouldn't want to build any large instruments using it's interface (not as bad as Kontakt's though!). And Reason's factory sample library is very outdated. But they did make the Reason rack plugin along the way, making it standalone recently.

[bermudagold]

Didn't even need 5 minutes to realize that Armory isn't even in the vicinity of the ballpark. Uninstalled.

ouch...fair enough...give him the feedback...maybe it could evolve into something good since i don't know if there are many other options at the 50 bucks or below price point

[Sascha Franck]

ouch...fair enough...give him the feedback...maybe it could evolve into something good since i don't know if there are many other options at the 50 bucks or below price point

Might give him some feedback. But seriously, it's a kinda ongoing thing for me, the UIs really aren't inspiring at all for me. Dark, small fonts, non resizeable, etc.

Fwiw, I'm happily supporting some smaller developers (I often donate for things that I don't end up using, too), but the kinda thing I'm looking for in this case is supposed to become one of the centerpieces of my musings (just as Battery has always been ever since I got my hands on it back with version 2 or so), so I'm not gonna accept too much compromises (unless there's no way around it).

[digitalboytn]

Battery 4 surely does not suck..

What don't you like about it?

Did you ever work with version 3? Then you'd know.

For starters:


And there's more than that.
Besides, Battery is dead, there's not gonna be any further development (semi-officially confirmed by NI in their own forums).

I have used Battery II as well.

This is an 11 year old video that everyone has watched a few times here, a few things have changed since then. And many things in the video are really not so important.

Also I asked you what YOU don't like about battery 4, not what is different from battery 3. What exactly stops you from using it to make a really good track?

Reading the comments on this youtube video, someone could understand why sales may have gone worse. Mostly people who like to repeat things they hear, or not having read a manual, or used the software, or moaning a feature is missing while the feature is there.

People have evolved to moan about things they do not like, and repeating things they hear, stuck in echo chambers, instead of focusing on things they like. They do this on everything in their lives nowadays. Human relationships, products, art, food, weather... you name it, they moan about it.

Battery 4 does not suck. I am pretty sure you can use it and make a platinum record with it as many others have done.

Your observations are spot on Sindikhate

[mixyguy2]

So much for the thread topic apparently...

[Grizzellda]

So much for the thread topic apparently...

"Righto", Kvr posters going off on tangents, bullsh*ting... who ever heard about that?

Let's talk about drum machines then! Well, we could get back to NI and talk about the Maschine. That looks like a nice drum machine. See, that is the kind of hardware that I would like to see them keep making. And those beautiful controller keyboards.

[oobesan]

The hate towards NI is bizarre. I have over 800 plugins. All the bundles from the all industry-leading brands/companies. Let's stick to drum machine plugins, since it has already derailed the thread. Besides Battery, I also have Triaz, XO, Tekno, Playbeat, Battalion, Backbone, AIR DrumSynth, as well as Logic Pro's Ultrabeat and Drum Machine Designer. There are a bunch things I love about each one of these, but there's also 3 or 4 things that drives me nuts about each one. However, the level of vitriol spewed at Battery by some people is on another level. And you could say the same thing about people's reactions towards NI, in general.