What do WE want from Battery?

This thread is intended to serve to purposes:
1. to introduce my person and my whys and hows with battery (and music)
2. to (hopefully) help the progammers at NI to evaluate what is REALLY wanted by the users when all will be NEW and SHINY in late fall 2003.

We HAVE this thread of the most imaginative features but admit it: if we put all this together we have Kontakt and can happily close this Forum and move over to the the Kontakt forum, can´t we? But when you reach deep down into your heart what does Battery REALLY need! Or say: How can we distingush Battery from Kontakt in the future?

This does NOT make the ´BATTERY features´ thread obsolete!!! Post your heart full of wishes THERE!!!!
But we simply can´t stop drumming the NI programmers to make them know what WE want.

1. (you can skip this if you are bored)
It all started in 1989 with the purchase of my first Amiga 500 then A2000, today beefed up A1200
when I started with eletronic music and of course samples. My greates inspireations were THE BITMAP BROTHERS and Jean Michel Jarres ZOOLOOKin 1986, which I find unchallanged until today.
After having played guitar for several years and then abandoned it, my personal musical Benediction was with Nine Inch Nails Broken/downward spiral. Since then I left behind everything one may call songwriting or has the slightest smell of "normal". My second musical bendiction
was Steves Reichs "come out to show them", which blew my mind beacuse of it´s simplicity in concept adn complexity in outcame.
When I then sought a system to move away from my dating Amiga I ended up with ProTools (w. DIGI001) as choice and a PowerMac as the concesquence, since I am not writing songs - I construct them. I have really little interest in sounding realistic. To give you a hint look at some pictures of scientific gear, labs, researchers and scifi (Forbidden Planet RULEZ) of the 50s and 60s- that´s the sound I like! You can aslo look at the works of The Designers Republic. That´s my sound!!!
That´s what I like it to sound: synthetic exact, full flavored white noise and totally WEIRDO!
since 1998 I also developed a tast for the real ANALOG /Outboard devices, could afford the money to spent and bought a Sherman Filterbank2 and loved it since then. To be precise: today I can´t even imagine how I could ever do without. Followed by a Waldorf microQ, choosing it over the Access Virus and others because of the price and the dirtier sound and the VA programming design. And since last Christmas the cool TLA Fatman induces even more dirt into my music. Then I was looking for a sample player for quite some time and my decesion came to Battery because of it´s basic and easy design. I didn´t want a all in one sampleplayer that can do everything like Kontakt, because I like to use filters, FX and stuff of MY OWN CHOICE! and constellation and when I do not use it why should I pay for it? I use Battery for everything thing that has to do with samples: Synths, voices, own design, natural, loops adn even drums;->, and everything I did not mention. I like to do things that can´t be achieved with instruments. And using Battery ONLY for drums would be ignorant to its abilities.
I like it all basic and generic so I can put the parts together like LEGO. I personally see myself less a musician than a researcher. That my products tend to be musically likewise is pure incident and a lack of ability on my side;->.

2. Besides the NECESSARY bug fixes with the load/save-, layer/sample-, organizations-, control/output-, and keyboradshortcut- failures and bad drum kits, I think there is a great gap between those who use Battery as STANDALONE/LIVE and the one using it as PLUGIN. With the PlugIn nearly all features can be implemented with the sequencer (what do you have them for?), as a Standalone, well it´s the other extreme.
-I personally would be more interested in a Kontakt like TONE ENGINE (yes this is contrary to what I said earlier) but the use with loops would be worth it since you can take the loop and tune it via midi to tempo changes and still have the same drive.
- and of course multiple Instances
- and DFD

so far and thanks again for your patience,
mindnoise

 

head like a hole, black as your soul, i´d rather die, than give you control...

Well, I respect your ideas mindnoise, even though mine are different. There seem to thousands of different ideas about Battery. I´m shure NI will never be able to serve every need. I hope the most importan ones, regarding DRUMS, will survive!

What I want from Battery, is to be the "right" software, for the Drumkits from Hell, or kits like that. Y´know something for the matcho, middle aged, truck drivers.

 

I have to add, that I do agree with you on the DFD and the multible instance thing.

 

A perfect software is neither possible nor wanted since it would be so big NO ONE could use it (while PERFECT is not to be mistaken for BUG FREE!!!).
But what will work for DRUMS serves my purposes very well with regards to time accuracy and multilayer. Nothing else is needed by me. It´s just this LITTLE MORE of flexibility that lets explode the use of Battery and that I am exploiting.
As DRUMMING appears to be the FIRST musical adventure of mankind and is customized for several thousand decades now, the importance to homo sapiens sapiens is not to be underesteemated and should, over time, be incorporated into new technologie to reflect that circumstance. With computer men created the perfect logic tool. The problem is men are neither logic nor perfect even if they crave for it like say Aristoteles or Picasso. Drums are a more spirtual experience than most other instruments because of this long interrelationship and it will be hard to carry that ´experience´ or meaning into the digital domain.
Are we talking William Gibson now?
Got carried away, sorry:-mindnoise PS: nice so see some more NINNIES out there)

 

I think all these homos of sapiens, erectus and habilis did the drum thing and all their forefathers too. Drumming, like sexuality, is an ever going, natural instinct of human kind. Like the womans beauty, it hasn´t changed much over the last thousands of years. It´s something we cannot change just by clicking a finger or loading these StarTrek kits (even though I find Dr. Spock kinda cool). I compromise a metal kit over the StarTrek kits. I would love to see more anthropological Battery.

 

Battery a human-drum interface?
I like that!!! But I think the programmers at NI will go mad...but should be worth investigating.

How can this be achieved without going VR?
As EMULATING playing drums has nothing superior to playing real drums.

And yes, we have to realize that men have anthropologically NOT really changed since at least the Pharaoes of Egypt or even further in the past. As a conlcusion one might say that everything will fail that doesn´t take this into account.

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again..if I had the following features, I would be happy..

1. Show title of loaded kit at top
2. Drag and drop between open instances of Battery. Drag cells, or layers, or settings.

WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL N.I.??

I guess this product has been dropped for support after only one release. Kind of makes me understand why guys don't want to dump money into software..

 

OSX

I want only one feature from Battery at this time:

OSX (and correspondingly, AU) compatability.

I bought Battery shortly before I had a forced migration to OSX. OS9 no longer boots properly on my system, and I have no real idea why nor the time to troubleshoot it. Right now, everything I use runs fine under OSX *except* for Battery. It's a real thorn in my side.

 

A comfortable, flexible and fast environment for the Drumkit from Hell. More cells so we can load both the close miked and the room miked Drumkit from Hell into one instance of Battery. Also more outputs (from 4 stereo to 8 stereo) so we can mix the whole drumkit (close miked and room miked) in one instance. I use two (dry and wet) stereo channels for snare, kick, hi-hats (cymbals) and toms (other). I would be nice to have that feature. Otherwise Battery is quite good for the Drumkit from Hell, especially with a good compressor, limiter and eq. I have made very, very, very pro drumtracks with the Drumkit from Hell. More than pro, a true art...

We can do it all with this drumkit.

 

man... i've got some requests but based on my past experience with tech help i doubt i'm gonna ever see any of this happen. plus they're about to come with osX and probably won't even update the older version, which i would really like to see happen as i'm not ready for osX. here goes anyway:

first of all, i'm using the 'studio collection' version of battery that is an rtas plug in for pro tools.

1. when adding sounds to battery you should be able to click and highlight the cell where you want to start adding sounds instead of having to select it once the 'load' or 'add' window is open. come on... very basic stuff here!!!

2. i still can't believe that when you're adding sounds to the matrix you can't 'option' click more than one sound at a time to be added to the lower box of sounds that will actually be loaded into the cells. at least not on a mac. right now you have to select one sound, hit the add button, then the cursor jumps back to the first sound in that folder... this SUCKS, especially if you're deep inside the folder of sounds. you have to scroll all the way down to where you were. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE fix this!!!

3. this is the biggest problem i've had. don't get me wrong, i really like battery but am becoming increasingly dissatisfied as a customer. i can not for the life of me get the multiple outs function to work in pro tools. i've left messages on this forum... i've exchanged emails with tech support... and none of it has helped. there is supposedly an office in hollywood, just 15 minutes from where i live, and i can never get a human to answer. so what do i do??? leave a message. what happens??? nothing. no one has ever returned a call from me. and, not to make it sound like i'm special or anything, but i am actually a working writer/producer with real live gigs in the music biz. pisses me off man. without this feature battery completely takes away the ability to record several tracks at a time. i can't complain enough about this. time is money in the studio and right now i can only record one or 2 tracks at a time.

n.i.... i dig the gear for the most part, but your help has been pathetic.

 

1. I think we MUST. The wolrd quite happily moves on without us... :-(
face it OS9 is so dead...

3.Ever tried to use multiple RTAS instances? You could use them on seperate AUX track an than submaster them to a Audiotrack, which means you have to tear apart you Battery mapping. This is nevertheless the only workaround I See til...

3. maybe I am pathetic but until September 2003 it will be undecided. It´s NOT to late.
NI constist of only a handful of people with a dozen projects. At least they have a time table for the NEW RELEASES!

I´ll wait for that.

HERE ME NI!!! RTAS NEEDS AUTOMATION AND ROUTABLE AUDIO OUTPUTS to BUSSES AND TRACKS!!!!!

mindnoise

 

As Chris closed the battery feature request thread and this tends to serve its original need no more, except my craving for the limelight;->, I´ll close this thread, too.

...Everything has been said before, there´s nothing left to say anymore...

thanks to all contributers !and! readers
for their spare time!

best mindnoise