Unfiltered Audio Battalion

[jobinho]

No, you are not alone: I wrote to them and they gave me the solution.
Press the square STOP button when your DAW is stopped, one or more times.

So indeed, it worked (only with default preset) and for a few days now, I haven't been able to do it anymore and am in your situation where I don't know how to prevent the sequencer from starting.

Thank you for confirming! I initially tried clicking the STOP button and was so confused. I'm glad that it at least sounds like a bug. I won't buy it unless there is a reliable option to turn the sequencer off. Just seems strange because you'd think it would be one of the first things someone would catch during beta testing. I hope there is a fix planned.

Fixes are seldom addressed with UA inside Plugin Alliance. Some previous plugins have been left unaddressed or not fleshed out to their full potential

[underscoreraven]

Fixes are seldom addressed with UA inside Plugin Alliance. Some previous plugins have been left unaddressed or not fleshed out to their full potential

If so then that's a bummer, because imo this plugin needs some fixes to be worth it's asking price. Specifically the CPU usage, including when it's at idle, seems far above what a plugin like this can realistically demand.

[pekbro]

Anyone try this with Reason? I was getting some midi overflows. Seems like they dont
get along.

[SLiC]

Fixes are seldom addressed with UA inside Plugin Alliance. Some previous plugins have been left unaddressed or not fleshed out to their full potential

Lion had quote a few bugfix and maintenance updates, I seem to remember BYOME did as well, but getting them directly from UE before they were on PA. The problem is the PA system doesn't tell you when there is an update, you have to research manually as far as I can tell and just redownload.

[Phil B]

The plugin alliance intermediation is definitely clunky (and slow to push updates through … unless UA decides to post them on their site in the interim) and paying $99 for something I know I’d be able to get for <$50 at some point in the not too distant future hurts … I’m going to get it anyway bugs and all because 1) it looks/sounds great and 2) I told myself that I’m going to support Michael’s next effort regardless because his free VCV phase modules were game changing for me

[Funk Dracula]

Test drove this for about 40 minutes today. Uninstalled.

[cyberboycoolen]

Test drove this for about 40 minutes today. Uninstalled.

Interested in your opinion was it the audio quality, or the UI? Have you used microtonic, and how would it compare?
Although I see that battalion have more Synth "sources", many of them sounded similar to me.

[WordClock]

Test drove this for about 40 minutes today. Uninstalled.

Battalion and Lion are weird names like Funk Dracula. Did you notice? Do you use Lion? I love Battalion and Lion's so so to me. I did get MIIDI overloads with it though a little and that really stinks.

[Funk Dracula]

Interested in your opinion was it the audio quality, or the UI? Have you used microtonic, and how would it compare?
Although I see that battalion have more Synth "sources", many of them sounded similar to me.

It's just not a good candidate for replacing what I would qualify as the "drum synth" genre like Microtonic, Tremor, StiX, etc. It doesn't sound good for that. And it's not that it sounds different, it's that I think the envelopes are kinda garbage, the pitch down envelope on kick attack sounds weird to me too. I don't like the filters, the saturation, or the fx as well. It just really didn't sound good to me at all.

It seems to shine when you straight up distort, glitch, or do very LOUD things with it, relying rather heavily on a weird sample you load in, which covers up it's weakness in that it's just not that good at all for regular synth drum duties.

I think the UI is fine. The modulation, "variation" modulation, and global modulation options are it's strong points. The sequencer seemed pretty good too. If you want to do glitchy, loud, and distorted things that modulate randomly like that video posted earlier in this thread, you can, but as a Bitwig user I don't need a plug-in to do this sort of stuff, let alone one that doesn't really sound good to me. The install comes with a sample library that is just going to take up space on my drive, so it was an easy decision to uninstall and move on because of that.

This is just my opinion tho! I don't want or mean to discount other's opinions who are loving it haha. I do give UA props for always trying to do some things differently.

Cheers

[WordClock]

Interested in your opinion was it the audio quality, or the UI? Have you used microtonic, and how would it compare?
Although I see that battalion have more Synth "sources", many of them sounded similar to me.

It's just not a good candidate for replacing what I would qualify as the "drum synth" genre like Microtonic, Tremor, StiX, etc. It doesn't sound good for that. And it's not that it sounds different, it's that I think the envelopes are kinda garbage, the pitch down envelope on kick attack sounds weird to me too. I don't like the filters, the saturation, or the fx as well. It just really didn't sound good to me at all.

It seems to shine when you straight up distort, glitch, or do very LOUD things with it, relying rather heavily on a weird sample you load in, which covers up it's weakness in that it's just not that good at all for regular synth drum duties.

I think the UI is fine. The modulation, "variation" modulation, and global modulation options are it's strong points. The sequencer seemed pretty good too. If you want to do glitchy, loud, and distorted things that modulate randomly like that video posted earlier in this thread, you can, but as a Bitwig user I don't need a plug-in to do this sort of stuff, let alone one that doesn't really sound good to me. The install comes with a sample library that is just going to take up space on my drive, so it was an easy decision to uninstall and move on because of that.

This is just my opinion tho! I don't want or mean to discount other's opinions who are loving it haha. I do give UA props for always trying to do some things differently.

Cheers

Those are useful interesting facts or non facts. If I can get in the mode I want to demo Battalion a bit to see if it can touch Microtonic & Blip Box & the Elektron Maschine drums & things like Axon 3. If it can I think that I got it right about how fun it could be to have all those engines in it.

Seems like false advertizing to claim all you can do is distortion and glitch with such fun engine types like Battalion has.

[gentleclockdivider]

Interested in your opinion was it the audio quality, or the UI? Have you used microtonic, and how would it compare?
Although I see that battalion have more Synth "sources", many of them sounded similar to me.

It's just not a good candidate for replacing what I would qualify as the "drum synth" genre like Microtonic, Tremor, StiX, etc. It doesn't sound good for that. And it's not that it sounds different, it's that I think the envelopes are kinda garbage, the pitch down envelope on kick attack sounds weird to me too. I don't like the filters, the saturation, or the fx as well. It just really didn't sound good to me at all.

It seems to shine when you straight up distort, glitch, or do very LOUD things with it, relying rather heavily on a weird sample you load in, which covers up it's weakness in that it's just not that good at all for regular synth drum duties.

I think the UI is fine. The modulation, "variation" modulation, and global modulation options are it's strong points. The sequencer seemed pretty good too. If you want to do glitchy, loud, and distorted things that modulate randomly like that video posted earlier in this thread, you can, but as a Bitwig user I don't need a plug-in to do this sort of stuff, let alone one that doesn't really sound good to me. The install comes with a sample library that is just going to take up space on my drive, so it was an easy decision to uninstall and move on because of that.

This is just my opinion tho! I don't want or mean to discount other's opinions who are loving it haha. I do give UA props for always trying to do some things differently.

Cheers

INteresting .
The beauty of simple drumsynths like microtonic is their surgically accurate envelopes , audio rate lfo's ( whcih can give you two noise sections if you desire too ) , filters etc..
It really shows that a small curated set of controls can yield exceptional results ( vintage tonic is prrof of that ) .
Are you saying that ( stripped from it's extra features ) Batallion is not capable of doing that ?
How do the osc's behave when modulated at audio rate by the lfo's , are the lfo's even audio rate capable ?
I am not talking about the fm mode , but barebones microtonic basic functionality .

[SLiC]

This was posted over at Electronoughts, I assume from a developer, extremely inciteful and looking very positive. Strait quote (was in answer to comments on will there be updates....)

We have more of a roadmap with this one. Kind of some backstory but Dent 2 was originally supposed to be a simple 1.1 update with a bunch of new algos. As novice plugin devs, we botched some parameter settings, and adding more modes would have ended up breaking settings in existing projects and presets. That kind of retooled our designs to try to get everything in for 1.0 since there were so many unknowns. Additionally, the old team at PA was pretty resistant to feature updates. Our new team at NI has been incredibly accommodating, down to getting us access to their enormous samples collection for us to curate the Battalion library. They’ve been enormously helpful and I can’t thank them enough.

This time around was the first time we didn’t get everything in place for 1.0, but we’ve been at it for over two years and it felt already like an incredible instrument, so we were at least comfortable with the release and it gives us space to better design some of the missing stuff.

So, I’m generally resistant to sharing future plans (since things like car accidents, aneurysms and global pandemics exist), but here’s a rough outline of the things we definitely want to add. This isn’t comprehensive as there are some other cool ideas that we’re still talking out:

First, we’re turning in a hotfix next week. This fixes the two largest bugs that made their way into release:

Crash from moving Performance Steps negative. I think this is the same crash as @Zelio with randomization, and randomization is just moving the Steps knob to the crash threshold. Still investigating, but both will be fixed. We didn’t hit this crash during a very active beta, so I’m worried a bad regression snuck in right before release. Speaking of which…
The stop button doesn’t work >_< This was a stupid mistake on my end and I’m catching a lot of YouTube flak for it The play, stop, undo, and redo icons had a color rendering error that was only visible in the light skins (which I definitely don’t use as much). PA’s video maker reported it to us as the marketing materials were being made, so I did a quick fix, tested it quickly in my standalone mode, and… shipped it off. Lesson learned.
Here are the more general things:

More engines. I axed out four synth engines (two noise generators, an inharmonic modal mode, and a minimal filter pinger) while Josh axed a really cool cymbal engine as those five were not quite as cooked. We do have ideas for more sampler engines as well.
Patterns! What this will look like is currently unknown, but we know that these are needed.
MIDI Output. We will for sure add live MIDI output so Battalion can trigger other things or the output can be recorded/manipulated. A lot of people have requested MIDI drag-and-drop export. I love the idea but won’t promise it yet because of how much is going on with the sequencer.
Toggled pitch quantization for the pitch knobs. This will be on by default for saved preset/project consistently, but it will be essential to turn this off for a lot of modulation purposes.
More algorithms for the maximizer. (Side note: we had a lot of requests to spin the maximizer off into a separate plugin. We’ve had a prototype since lo-fi-af and Needlepoint. Battalion’s maximizer is new, but we’re definitely considering a lot of things there).
More “distortion” modes, including one-knob not-distortion things (like one-knob filters so you can place a traditional filter before/after the comb filter).
Sequencer locks
More detailed global randomization.
Expanded MIDI input for things like start/stop, mute/solo, performance, and randomization.
Less essential things that we would still love to add but need to design:

Button to resample the current synth engine into the sampler.
Performance slots. If I can think of a nice design for morphing between slots like the Octatrack I would love to add it.

[kraster]

I like the plugin but I'm getting Sugarbytes DrumComputer vibes from it.

ie. Great feature set, tons of options but quite tricky to get basic functionality from it.

DrumComputer really struggles with things like kicks and I kind of found the same with Battallion. It's easier to do with Battallion because the sample implementation is better than DC but then you're just really leaning on sample playback.

The default kick engine, for example, sounds pretty "boxy" or dull or clicky but never quite right. The pillow engine is softer but too soft to be useful.

It definitely excels at the weirder side of percussion synthesis.

On a more general point I think percussion synths are all about perfectly tuned parameterisation. Take any classic drum machine like the 808 or 909. They operate within a very narrow range for a reason.

In the VST world I think Microtonic has that quality to it. Everything feels "right". Take the eq for example. Whatever wizardry they've implemented it always sounds "right". If you want more punch, thud, smack etc. that eq just makes it easy to dial in.

Same with the envelopes, the distortion, the oscillators, the filters on the noise.

Microtonic is a masterpiece. A ridiculous range of sounds from a relatively simple interface.

[wasi]

I came for the drum machine but stayed for the sequencer. The sequencer and the euclidian generators are extremely cool.

Also loving the 'variation' parameter on the voices. This thing is extremely cool.

[Ploki]

I like the plugin but I'm getting Sugarbytes DrumComputer vibes from it.

ie. Great feature set, tons of options but quite tricky to get basic functionality from it.

DrumComputer really struggles with things like kicks and I kind of found the same with Battallion. It's easier to do with Battallion because the sample implementation is better than DC but then you're just really leaning on sample playback.

The default kick engine, for example, sounds pretty "boxy" or dull or clicky but never quite right. The pillow engine is softer but too soft to be useful.

It definitely excels at the weirder side of percussion synthesis.

On a more general point I think percussion synths are all about perfectly tuned parameterisation. Take any classic drum machine like the 808 or 909. They operate within a very narrow range for a reason.

In the VST world I think Microtonic has that quality to it. Everything feels "right". Take the eq for example. Whatever wizardry they've implemented it always sounds "right". If you want more punch, thud, smack etc. that eq just makes it easy to dial in.

Same with the envelopes, the distortion, the oscillators, the filters on the noise.

Microtonic is a masterpiece. A ridiculous range of sounds from a relatively simple interface.

spot on