Battery has become my favourite and most-used VST sampler – replacing both HALion, and my hardware sampler.
It's a deceptively powerful and flexible instrument, capable of doing much more than playing the supplied drum kits.
I use it for just about everything; single hit sounds, loops, basses, vocals – even for triggering AIFF mixdowns of other VST instruments (a trick which can save you a lot of CPU, especially if the other instrument is Reaktor).
I like the GUI, and the fact that most parameters are either visible immediately, or just one mouse-click away. I like the built in waveshaping and bit-reduction effects, and I love the option of having up to eight stereo and sixteen mono outputs to the VST mixer!
The "FX loop" function, with its snap-to-zero option, makes it very easy to create looping sustain portions for pitched sounds (as well as nice glitchy drum noises), and the pitch envelopes can be used for some excellent "warped" effects.
Copying a drum loop to multiple cells and adjusting the Start point and amp envelope settings for each copy makes it surprisingly easy to separate phrases into single hits – for "do-it-yourself" ReCycling – and this is something I find myself doing more and more.
The only thing that Battery lacks is a resonant filter – and it's so easy to insert (for example) OhmBoyz's freeware Frohmage into a mixer channel that you soon forget about this omission.
To sum up: an extremely usable, functional VSTi, which I have come to depend on probably more than any other.Read Review
