Battery

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.Read Review