Battery 4
Battery 4 is a professional drum sampler plugin from Native Instruments, designed for music producers and beat makers working in electronic, hip-hop, and pop production. It combines a library of 143 drum kits with a drag-and-drop workflow for creating custom drum kits by loading factory samples or importing user audio. Key features include seven sample playback modes (including groove-box emulations), seven onboard effects (EQ, compression, transient shaping, saturation, reverb), MIDI mapping, time-stretching via Time Machine Pro, and velocity-layered instruments. Battery 4 runs as a VST, AU, and AAX plugin in digital audio workstations like Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Pro Tools, and Cubase.
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1 suggestionBattery 4 ships a native Apple Silicon build of its VST and AU plugins (released in January 2023), so if you are hosting it in a VST-compatible DAW on an Apple Silicon Mac, you can get the native version. However, the update path is critical: you must use Native Instruments' official update channel, Native Access, to install or update Battery 4 — do not rely on generic downloads or the Mac App Store. Open Native Access, log in with your Native Instruments account, locate Battery 4 in your library, and ensure you have the latest version installed. Native Access will automatically serve the native Apple Silicon build on M-series Macs; the older Intel-only build under Rosetta will be replaced. Verify after installation that your DAW reports Battery 4 as arm64 (not Intel). If you see it still loading as Intel despite a recent Native Access update, try removing the Intel version from your system plug-in folder (usually ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST) and reinstalling via Native Access. The native build delivers notably better CPU efficiency and lower latency than the Rosetta translation.
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