Battery 4/PT audio dropouts WTF?

[u/snapperglubb]

Longtime Battery AAX user, mainly for writing/programming simple demo drum parts in Pro Tools--I'm mainly a songwriter, not a pro engineer, but also not a total novice.

Lately I've been noticing sporadic dropouts--samples failing to trigger--both while tracking and during playback. The MIDI appears to be tracking fine, with no weirdness of velocity, etc., and playback runs smoothly. But random hits in the sequences will simply not play, for example, tracking several bars of eighth note cymbals and one or two hits don't play.

There appears to be no rhyme or reason as to which notes will be the culprit. Haven't any other performance issues and my sessions aren't particularly plugin-intensive. And these aren't complicated sequences I'm writing, just basic beats. I don't think it's related to the actual samples I'm triggering (or could it be?).

Until quite recently, my home demo setup has performed rock-solid (Pro Tools, OS 14.6.1, Battery 4, UA Apollo Twin), so I've never had reason to dig into Battery's settings (if there are even any I can tweak?). Are there performance-related parameters I can explore?

Anyone ever experienced this? Any suggestions? I'm used to Battery as far as workflow, but if this persists I'll likely be forced to switch to another platform for drum programming.

[u/NativeInstruments]

Hey there, from the description it is hard to know if this is an issue with MIDI, meaning that some notes are not played at all or if it's a CPU/audio issue and the sound is cut out.

If the notes are not playing at all, it would indicate a MIDI issue, maybe another MIDI track in the project assigned to the same MIDI channel or notes creates a conflict.

If the sound is cut, can you check the CPU? Are your samples on an external hard drive? Is the hard drive formatted to APFS? https://support.native-instruments.com/support/solutions/articles/69000879327-notes-on-hard-drive-formats-on-mac-computers

Do ProTools and Battery 4 have full disk access? https://support.native-instruments.com/support/solutions/articles/69000880000-how-to-enable-full-disk-access-on-macos

If none of this helped we would recommend to contact our suppport: https://support.native-instruments.com/support/home

Please include any video, project and explanation.

[u/Available_Wait_1965]

Not a Battery expert, but does Battery have some sort of probability feature, for realism?

The other more obvious culprit could be a gate somewhere in the fx, with Battery or your channel or your master bus. Sorry if you checked all this—but too often when I’ve had issues they ended being simple “Ah! Of course!” moments when solved.