Native Instruments Battery 2
A drum sampler that let you rebuild its own face - nine cells or seventy-two, your call.
Overview
Battery 2 arrived from Native Instruments as a $229 sample-playback software drum module, or $119 for owners upgrading from the first Battery. The upgrade price says the company wanted existing users to come along. This was a rebuild, not a patch. The headline change was the interface. Earlier versions fixed the cell layout. Battery 2 let users customize the grid to hold anywhere from 9 to 72 cells, and the cell matrix could be rearranged as desired. That meant the screen could be shrunk down for a four-piece kit or opened up for a sprawling electronic setup.
EQ (March 2005, p.56) reviewed the overhaul and noted the plug-in ran in VST, Audio Units, and DXi formats with ASIO2 driver support. The magazine's format listing also carried an OCR-garbled entry that reads "ATAS" - almost certainly RTAS - but the archive treats that as uncertain. The review positioned Battery 2 as a serious cross-platform tool, not a light sample player.
The engine underneath got real attention too. Battery 2 supported 256-note polyphony, hard-disk streaming, and a wider range of sample formats than before - Giga and REX files among them, according to Electronic Musician's coverage of the release. Each cell gained an additional envelope generator, an extra LFO, a compression section, and a 6-pole resonant filter with equalizer offering 15 types ranging from lowpass to comb and vowel filters. An expanded selection of modulation sources let users modulate as many as the sources allowed. All that per-cell processing makes each pad closer to a miniature synth voice than a sample trigger.
Native Instruments' own advertising in Sound on Sound (July 2005, p.31) pitched the instrument as a "dedicated drum sampler" built around customizable sample-cells, each slot carrying its own feature set. That's marketing copy, but it lines up with how the independent press described the same architecture. The pitch emphasized speed and ease of use alongside the depth, claiming the control scheme was as fast as it was intuitive.
Battery 2 found its way into working studios quickly. In a Electronic Musician feature on the Niyaz record Niyaz/Niyai, engineer Rizzo described using Native Instruments' Absynth, Battery 2, FM7, and Reaktor to build parts in Pro Tools. The same publication later demonstrated drum-map MIDI recording in Sony Acid 6 using Battery, well after launch.
The record does not establish release dates beyond the 2005 review and advertising window, a full list of supported sample formats, or how the software has aged on modern systems. The archive has no pricing data for the secondhand market and no documentation of known bugs or compatibility failures. It's software, so there's no cabinet to refinish and no capacitors to replace. Whether it still runs is a question the sources here don't answer.
Battery 2 was a transitional product. It was still recognizably the cell-grid drum sampler of the original, but rebuilt with enough per-cell synthesis and filtering to blur the line between sampler and drum synth. The customizable grid was the visible change. The envelope, LFO, compression, and multi-type filter per cell were the substantive ones. Owners who came from Battery 1 could upgrade at $119.
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