Battery

This is what a software drum sampler should look like, and it is excellent using factory kits. However, when you start to go off on your own, things can get confusing and buggy very quickly. There are no industry standard template maps and having to map buttons constantly can kill my creative workflow in no time flat. I struggle to find the time to sit down and create them myself.

But if you can afford to take the time to make it your own, it's a more than capable machine. I recommend getting it with some version of Komplete, and getting the value of Kontakt and maybe Massive along with it. Then like me, if you find yourself not using it much, the value in Kontakt and Massive will more than make up for it.

imho Battery is great... i own komplete 12...

great quality samples
you can load your own samples
you can make custom Kits
the gui is fine, it's working, it's str8 forward...you see everything you need at once,
there's no need to learn tonz of stuff to use it.

only con i see on it is the 16 stereo outputs... when it comes to big kits with more than 15-16 samples unfortunately i have to run 2 instances of it just for routing them all to different mixer channels.. on every else perspective it's awesome :)

Bad programming (slow in general), would be good dead links to be linked again (users know what I mean). Generally good but...

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.