necho wrote:I hope they don't discontinue it.
I'd imagine they might start to leverage Maschine technology in future development of Battery though.
Ummm.... I'm not so sure that's really a good thing, unless you don't want Battery to integrate into Live AT ALL, which is where Maschine is at right now. It currently doesn't respond to MIDI In from a DAW, and cannot send MIDI Out to a DAW, either. This is something when mentioned on the NI Maschine forum is met with the response that you should just bounce everything to audio because that's the modern produktion technique, anyway. I'm seriously not joking about that, either. Go there and see for yourself... Anyway, Battery is far ahead of Maschine in that regard.
necho wrote:Although sometimes I wonder if they're about to ditch all their good producer products in favour of guitarists and DJs.
Life without Kontakt and Reaktor would be hell.
I wouldn't put that past them, at all. My impression so far in dealing with NI is that they aren't nearly as customer-focused as Ableton. I don't own Kore, but from what I understand they pretty well screwed over their Kore 1 customers when they quickly put out Kore 2. I have much more respect for Ableton then NI. Although I do have to admit that some of their produkts sound really good. Still, in the Battery vs. Drum Racks debate, I'd definitely go with Drum Racks. Not even a question for me...
In fact, their glorious Maschine for me now is just a Drum Racks pad kontroller. Which makes me feel a little bit stupid or naive, in that I could just be using a Trigger Finger or whatever. And I had to tweak the UserRemoteConfig in Ableton just to get it to do that even, since Instant Mappings weren't supported, and NI offered absolutely no assistance in doing so, let me assure you.
Basically, I don't see why anyone would want to pay extra money to buy Battery, when Drum Racks are built-in and do a MUCH better job, anyway. If you already had been using Battery, then a point could possibly be made, but even then I'd still advise just to learn to use Drum Racks, which really don't even have much of a learning curve, anyway....