Battery 4 development
Comments
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For me, this has been the final nail in the NI coffin. I will keep using some selected Kontakt libraries for a while and that was it. I will otherwise never trust this company ever again.
Fortunately, Steinberg is having a sale right now and I'll purchase their Absolute 6 bundle, including Groove Agent, which seems to kinda work as a Battery replacement. Plus, at least it's developed and updated.
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Fwiw, my apologies, Battery still seems to be included in Komplete 15.
Ok, NI, then bring those updates!
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Bugfixes (for reasonably serious issues - like say the arrival of Mac OS Sequoia for example) would most certainly still happen - especially with Battery 4 being included in K15 .
However this is generally referred to as "maintenance" not "development".
If anyone was expecting anything "new" to come to any of the OG NI stalwarts like Reaktor, FM8 or Battery 4 just because Komplete 15 has been announced - they haven't been paying attention for a great many years.
VP
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Battery 4 will be a part of Komplete 15. There will be an update fixing some really long lasting bugs and bring Sonoma official compatibility. There is no ETA at the moment but I had the confirmation the company was committed to bring that update to life.
But yeah, there will not be active development or new features any time soon.
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That is as good as dead. Besides, NI didn't manage to adress these issues in 2 years by now. Why would anyone believe this would change now that it's a dead product?
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I hear you, I can understand that you feel this way and whatever i say will not convince you after all this time.
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Unfortunately, that is correct. And we all know that Battery will be dead rather sooner than later. Same as with Reaktor. I mean, telling people "there will not be active development or new features any time soon" - well, what is any sane person supposed to believe, especially given NI's history of abandoning almost tons of (pretty great) products in the past already?
I can perfectly understand that it might not be worth it anymore from an economic POV. But then, FFS, give the codebase to someone else, make it public domain or whatever.
Also, in case of Battery, I strongly believe there's a decent market for such a plugin (lots of folks are actually looking for alternatives and some came up in recent years). But obviously, NI didn't care about it since a long time anymore already. We all know how much of a step back from Battery 3 it's been in many aspects. Could've been sort of taken back so B4 was at least on par. But NI never even remotely cared.
And all that is why nobody believes in a future for Battery.
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Fwiw, as I try to be as fair as possible, I need to partially apologize to NI.
No, that doesn't make Battery's development much better all of a sudden, but please read on.
So here goes:
The main issue I'm having with Battery would be that the dialog to relocate missing samples never pops up.
But (!): This is only true when running Logic in silicon-native mode. As soon as you open Logic in Rosetta mode, the dialog pops up and samples can be relocated just fine.
Also, from all I know, some other issues are gone once Logic is started in Rosetta-mode.Ok, we could now still suspect it'd be a Battery issue, so NI would be the ones to fix it - but that doesn't seem to be the entire truth. Because there seems to be something pretty fishy going on within Logic's new way of treating plugins (as a separate process, from all I know, rather than within the same process as Logic).
Not only does it come up with pretty much non-sensical crash reports (that you can basically click away via some restore button without something serious ever happening - so you never need to use the second "restart" option) when idling (never while working, which is super suspicious already) - no, Steinberg's Groove Agent is having exactly the same sample relocating issues, as in the "Find Missing Samples" dialog to never pop up. And again, just as with Battery, everything is working as supposed to as soon as I start Logic in Rosetta-mode.Bottomline: While there might be several other issues with Battery, in this particular case the offender very clearly is Apple, at least partially (perhaps entirely, but as a mere user I can't tell). Logic's silicon-native mode simply doesn't work properly.
Alright, what I'd like to ask you NI folks would be to possibly get together with some other plugin developers and start harrassing Apple. They need to do at least some things on their own, it's very clearly not just the developer's faults. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't ever listen to any Logic users, but in case some big names in the plugin industry start lobbying a bit, things may look differently. And in the end, it's a win-win situation for at least some developers and the users (and possibly Apple as well, because really, they need to get their act straight).
I already wrote some similar things to Steinberg and will try to contact some more developers as well.
Regards
Sascha0 -
They should be honest and confirm they will never release Battery 5. As users we need to know these things to plan accordingly. The update might come after wating 2 years but what about reworking certain aspects? Like Sascha said, B4 was a step back from B3. That was over 10 years ago. They were made aware that B4 was worse than B3 right away but didn't do anything about it. This is more than lame. They don't seem to understand that Battery is part of Komplete as a whole. It needs to be developed and maintained as well even if it costs more money than it brings. Just read about tons of people jumping ship from NI. No wonder, really.
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Everything, except Kontakt, GR7, Maschine and Massive X is pretty much EOD. Baring maintenance and bug fixes, I mean.
I really don’t know why people are grasping at straws…
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Very likely, GR7 will follow one day. Rather sooner than later.
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Possible, but they’ve made an effort to re-do the GUI as scalable with GR6, so I think they might keep it around for years to come (as in: actually develop it further), we shall see 😉
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Well - if it is not obvious after 10+ years of waiting - what value is there is making a big announcement saying you are NOT going to release a new version?
That does not make any sense - regardless of how much "planning" one thinks they need to do.
In business - if a product is an active part of a portfolio and that product is selling AND that product has a defined future - new versions appear as a matter of standard product lifecycles. Like Kontakt 8 etc…
However - in this case - Battery 4 is the "old" NI. The "new" NI owners have no attachment to it or any of it's assorted baggage. They also have most certainly done all the due diligence they need to do - to confirm that devoting time, talent and resource to this product - does not compute in what they would ever get back from it.
The new owners are (sadly) about profit and loss and pleasing shareholders - and not what is good for us. The quicker the forum community gets dialled into this fact - the less arguing and speculation would occur.
Leaving us more time to talk about those products that are important (and moving forward) in the NI world.
VP
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Well, while I'm aware of whatever financial pressure, IMO pretty much all of the business decisions made by NI are downright stupid.
Sure, they'll keep their USP products such as Kontakt and Maschine, but at least with Kontakt, it's not really that much of a must-have anymore as at least some (partially big) players are switching to their own formats.
The other USP products in NI's portfolio have been the "creative" ones. Such as Reaktor, Absynth and, well, Battery. NI has been pretty much the leading company regarding all these things for quite a while.
Now, as said, I perfectly understand financial issues. But still, IMO they're shooting themselves in their feet. It's not all about profit, it's as well about support, both technically and creatively (if that makes sense). For a company in this kinda business, taking care about these two is like free advertising. A new Kontakt library however is just something yawn-worthy. At best, in case someone even takes notice.
Whatever. I'm pretty happy with Steinberg's Absolute 6 for the time being (IMO they need a new UI design team, though…), so I will keep using a handful of Kontakt libraries until K6 won't work anymore at all and that was about it. No further NI plugins shall litter my oh-so-pretty million selling projects ever again (too bad about Raum, fwiw, I quite like it).
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Thanks for the laugh.
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