Ableton Forum

necho wrote:

toph wrote:

stallos wrote:the only drawback for me is that you cant drag and drop samples from lives browser.

You can do so in Live 8 with Battery 3. Tested that one minute ago.

C.

Oh shit - now I'm gonna have to upgrade to Live 8.

Really???

Wow, that's actually kind of big (for me). I may be upgrading to v.8 after all...

Another comparison...

IMO Live's Drums Racks is easier to map samples to keys than Battery 3.

Battery 3's default mapping slows things down (for me at least).

What version of Live are you currently on? Doesn't Live 8 and Live 7 have the same capabilities for Drum Racks?

I think battery takes too much CPU for essentially what is a drum rack.

Especially since I seperate all my drum tracks into different channels I would have to run like 6 instances of battery on every song... plus vst synths plus fx.

For 99 dollars, euros, or pounds, Battery 3 is worth it. Easy to make your own kits and it also comes with a big library.

CHARLIE! wrote: Especially since I seperate all my drum tracks into different channels I would have to run like 6 instances of battery on every song... plus vst synths plus fx.

Why not use Battery's multi-outs?

One thing I like about Battery (and VST's in general) compared to Drum Racks is having a nice big interface to work with, without the need for ever-increasing side scrolling.

necho wrote:

toph wrote:

stallos wrote:the only drawback for me is that you cant drag and drop samples from lives browser.

You can do so in Live 8 with Battery 3. Tested that one minute ago.

C.

Really???

Wow, that's actually kind of big (for me). I may be upgrading to v.8 after all...

Hmm, in re-reading this I see (and have confirmed through a friend who has L8) that this *only* works from the browser, and not from Arrange or Session. So not as cool as I thought (for me), as this does not improve loop slicing with a 3rd party instrument. Since Live still cannot slice-to-track in Arrange, one has to do it manually and then render out to the browser before being able to use them in something like Battery.

I had the same dilemma. Ended up settling for the drum racks, although I still prefer bouncing each hit from the racks onto audio channels, then getting rid of the racks. Like others have said, depends on how you work really.

I spent the money on Sylenth1 instead, and don't regret it one bit.

Before Live 7, I used it all of the time. Now I never use it. I may steal some sounds out of it's library, but I just open them in a Drum Rack.

I bought battery 3 when I was using pro tools. I moved over to live 7 and I haven't used battery since. Like other users have been saying, just buy sample packs you like and use them with drum racks. That's what I do and found it to work very fast.

You don't NEEEEED Battery 3, but for the price point it's worth the extra couple of advantages over Drum Racks. Don't get me wrong though, Live's Drum Rack is great and does almost everything that Battery 3 does (so you could essentially still use it to do what you already use Battery for), but for 99 euros, you can think of it like upgrading to a bigger and better version.

i love battery but unless you want to use a drum rack outside live and you own sampler i dont hting there is any point to be honest......although saying that they have some tastey drum sounds in their sample library and im not sure but (can someone confirm this) i think they are in a format that's incompatible with live.

Peace

Brian

besides... I think they're discontinuing it... in favor of maschine...
(I could be wrong)

3dot... wrote:besides... I think they're discontinuing it... in favor of maschine...
(I could be wrong)

Maybe, but I don't think so, because Battery and Maschine have different concepts. And as Battery is a kind of standard when it comes to drum plug-ins, I think they'll continue developing it.

To me it feels more like Battery 4 is not so far away, as NI is often doing special deals before announcing upgrades. And even if they'd discontinue development, Battery 3 is a very useful peace of software for me personally.

C.

I hope they don't discontinue it.

I'd imagine they might start to leverage Maschine technology in future development of Battery though.

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.

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....