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Ultrabeat vs Battery?

vpunk

By vpunk
in Logic Pro

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Dave Jolley Newbie

Dave Jolley

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too true, but I think it's still worth the hassle. TBH, I haven't had any crashes with it, but I did have it corrupt on me once. Besides that one time, it's worked perfectly.

 

 

 

here's a few of battery's strengths over ultrabeat.

 

-THE CELL LIBRARY-- the ability to switch out samples by type while the song is playing is HUGE. Finding the perfect kick/snare combo has never been so easy. This alone makes it worth the purchase, and WAY better than UB

 

- the ability to zoom in on the waveform and set your start markers perfectly

 

- the envelopes are more flexible

 

- convolution reverb, and built in delay

 

- articulations are pretty damn cool and a time saver

 

- built in audio editor

 

- the ability to map multiple samples to one key/cell

 

- the modulation possibilities are WAY more in depth

 

- more intuitive interface (IMO)

 

- the kickass library that comes with it. I don't really use any other drum samples, maybe a few classic breaks as well, but this library kicks major ass and is pretty much all I need to make great electronic music.

 

 

UB'S strength?

 

the fact that it's perfectly integrated into Logic, and uses less cpu.

 

 

I use both. Battery for all my drums, and UB for all my glitch, percussion, and efx hits

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thelocalhost Newbie

thelocalhost

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-THE CELL LIBRARY-- the ability to switch out samples by type while the song is playing is HUGE. Finding the perfect kick/snare combo has never been so easy. This alone makes it worth the purchase, and WAY better than UB

 

Actually, I think UB is better in this regard. UB has a 'preview in kit' feature that allows you to browse through your sample lib and preview new selected samples. And more importantly, there is a 'cancel' button, which will revert back to your originally selected sample. Battery has no UNDO feature. This makes things very unforgiving. And the fact battery can't preview it's own proprietary format in it's own browser is absurd. Absolutely f-ing absurd. From a workflow perspective, this makes battery very lame. The battery browser is only there to preview rex2 loops. And there's no search!!! What year is this? Battery should have a appleloop-esque browser for samples. It's 2007 and there's this thing called metadata.

 

- convolution reverb, and built in delay

 

- more intuitive interface (IMO)

 

Battery has a bunch of oddities that make no sense. There is only 1 type of send for ALL the samples (i.e. 1 type of reverb, 1 type of delay).

 

Another oddity. The reverb/delay is only applied to 1/2. Not 3/4, 5/6 etc... So it's usefulness is limited. Battery3 should have a Kontakt esque routing/aux setup. The current implementation is lame.

 

Concerning the interface. I think it's a counterintuitive mess and the browser is worthless. Why are the 'cell' tab and the 'browser' tab so far apart? They should be adjacent. There should be display for the each output and routing to it's OWN send. And there should be search using metadata feature.

 

Battery could be such an amazing program, but the oddities make it a lackluster unforgiving experience.

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Dave Jolley Newbie

Dave Jolley

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-THE CELL LIBRARY-- the ability to switch out samples by type while the song is playing is HUGE. Finding the perfect kick/snare combo has never been so easy. This alone makes it worth the purchase, and WAY better than UB

 

Actually, I think UB is better in this regard. UB has a 'preview in kit' feature that allows you to browse through your sample lib and preview new selected samples. And more importantly, there is a 'cancel' button, which will revert back to your originally selected sample. Battery has no UNDO feature. This makes things very unforgiving. And the fact battery can't preview it's own proprietary format in it's own browser is absurd. Absolutely f-ing absurd. From a workflow perspective, this makes battery very lame. The battery browser is only there to preview rex2 loops. And there's no search!!! What year is this? Battery should have a appleloop-esque browser for samples. It's 2007 and there's this thing called metadata.

 

- convolution reverb, and built in delay

 

- more intuitive interface (IMO)

 

Battery has a bunch of oddities that make no sense. There is only 1 type of send for ALL the samples (i.e. 1 type of reverb, 1 type of delay).

 

Another oddity. The reverb/delay is only applied to 1/2. Not 3/4, 5/6 etc... So it's usefulness is limited. Battery3 should have a Kontakt esque routing/aux setup. The current implementation is lame.

 

Concerning the interface. I think it's a counterintuitive mess and the browser is worthless. Why are the 'cell' tab and the 'browser' tab so far apart? They should be adjacent. There should be display for the each output and routing to it's OWN send. And there should be search using metadata feature.

 

Battery could be such an amazing program, but the oddities make it a lackluster unforgiving experience.

 

 

Agreed on most of these second points, there are quite a few ergonomics oddities about B3 that could be better. Still the MPC style interface, while not as visually cool to look at, is WAY more accessible. There *is* MIDI delay available on a cell level, with more subdivision choices available. Not the most character to it, but no worse than a generic digital delay.

 

However, When I hear you talk about the cell library, I'm left with the impression that you haven't explored it that fully. I agree that it's counterproductive to not be able to preview whole kits in battery, Though, I personally wouldn't want to wait for the load time on some of the larger kits of theirs; those kits are HUGE compaired to UB kits, and would be a pain in the ass (and CPU) to preview. You can however, preview hits and samples alongside rex files in the brower--But I fear you've missed my point. The browser is NOT the cell library. The cell library is the library with aliases for all the individual hit from each kit, categorized by drum type (kicks- acoustic, etc...). This is really huge. I can write a part, and FROM THE CELL, or from the browser, scroll through all the different kicks and find the prefect one to fit my song, WHILE IT's PLAYING. It completely takes the guesswork and the time hunting samples down out of the process.

 

To me, I rarely swap out whole kits, so this isn't a feature I sorely miss in battery. I usually start with a kit I like and swap out hits to dial in the sound I want. I find the whole thing to be WAY faster and more fluid than UB. Being able to zoom in and set the sample start at the very peak of the transient is a big deal for the type of rhythmically tight and precise music I make, and that feature alone makes battery well worth keeping. I'm actually shocked that apple hasn't incorporated some sort of zoom for the sample player in Osc 2.

 

To me, UB is great, but not that useable if you're writing beats from samples where precision of transient and speed of use are important. That's why I still use Battery, and why I recommend it to the original poster.

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thelocalhost Newbie

thelocalhost

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Agreed on most of these second points, there are quite a few ergonomics oddities about B3 that could be better. Still the MPC style interface, while not as visually cool to look at, is WAY more accessible. There *is* MIDI delay available on a cell level, with more subdivision choices available. Not the most character to it, but no worse than a generic digital delay.

 

However, When I hear you talk about the cell library, I'm left with the impression that you haven't explored it that fully. I agree that it's counterproductive to not be able to preview whole kits in battery, Though, I personally wouldn't want to wait for the load time on some of the larger kits of theirs; those kits are HUGE compaired to UB kits, and would be a pain in the ass (and CPU) to preview. You can however, preview hits and samples alongside rex files in the brower--But I fear you've missed my point. The browser is NOT the cell library. The cell library is the library with aliases for all the individual hit from each kit, categorized by drum type (kicks- acoustic, etc...). This is really huge. I can write a part, and FROM THE CELL, or from the browser, scroll through all the different kicks and find the prefect one to fit my song, WHILE IT's PLAYING. It completely takes the guesswork and the time hunting samples down out of the process.

 

I never said previewing the entire kit. I said previewing a cell. Battery has no undo and you can't preview cl3 in the browser without loading them into a cell. This is the completely retard part of battery. When I finish assembling a kit, sometimes i want to experiment with other kicks (while the host is playing), I have to remember which sample I originally loaded, then select a different cl3 files within the browser (to load them into that cell). Since there is no undo, this is completely lame. (the best part is the "in Kit Preview" option in the browser. Maybe someday it will actually work....)

 

I think UB implementation is way better. You can just choice 'cancel' and the originally loaded sample is reloaded. And you realize you can do this "WHILE IT's PLAYING" in Ultrabeat?

 

I still think Battery's browser is big piece of useless s#!+. It makes the battery experience very lame.

 

In general, the program has this 80% completed feel.

 

Ever try to import exs files? The velocity mapping doesn't work.

 

Do you ever use the "Conditions" in the "Cell Activation"? Triggering the cell (in a group by clicking is different than triggering the cells by midi.

 

How do you set the level out of 3/4, 5/6, etc...? Is the main meter displaying all the levels, or just the 1/2? The fact that I have to ask these basic questions, means that there is poor design.

 

Why does drag-drop only work in StandAlone mode?

 

It's has a lot of quarks that are very counterintuitive and sometimes it's a pain to work with.

 

Did I mention the no UNDO feature?

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fader8 Newbie

fader8

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Hey - I have all my old samples from Battery - what can I load these into to play them?

The EXS24? or BFD?

 

Ally,

 

If your BFD plug-in allows you to import samples and build your own kits, then that's your most economical way, ie free. Otherwise, to configure exsp24 kits you can purchase Redmatikas Keymap, which is wonderful for making instruments, or bite the bullet and upgrade to Logic Pro which would give you exs instrument editing capabilities.

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