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When Battery first hit the streets a couple of years ago, it made a sizeable impact on the drum-programming community. Supporting a variety of sampler import formats, an interesting albeit limited set of lo-fi/sound design effects, a respectable collection of included kits, and a straight-forward, no-nonsense user interface, Battery provided groove addicts with enough fire-power to create all manner of live-sounding and synthetic beats. Time and technology have marched on, however, leaving Battery behind the curve compared to other drum synths and samplers. Naturally, this brings us to Battery version 2 (or simply B2), which boasts a number of improvements both large and small, along with a healthy dose of new drum sounds to get your creative juices going.
FROM THE TOP
Interface-wise, Battery uses the now familiar "matrix/cell" model, in which samples are assigned to cells within a matrix. There can be a maximum of 72 cells, each of which can be triggered by a single MIDI key or a range of keys. A cell can contain up to 128 samples, so it's possible to program highly dynamic velocity- switched and velocity-crossfaded drum and percussion hits.
New in B2, the matrix can be set up to show nine or 12 columns. The number of rows can also be reduced from six down to one, which allows for very small kits and space-saving kits with no more than nine cells. This may seem like a small thing, but having a smaller matrix is helpful when dealing with a smaller pool of samples, because with fewer cells, there's more space to display their contents.
The expanded library is a considerable improvement from the original content (which is included for backwards compatibility). There's a wealth of choice kits comprising "best of" samples from FM7, Reaktor, Limelite, Krypt, Absynth, and other synth beat boxes in NI's lineup. I was especially impressed by the selection of glitch and sound design-oriented kits such as Dusty Circuit. On the other end of the spectrum, the Jazz Brush and Multi-Mic kits are both superb for natural, realistic performances.
Several features have been ported over from NI's flagship sampler, Kontakt. Among them, direct-from-disk streaming. Instead of loading samples...