Battery RTAS/XP, a good buy?

I noticed that Battery available in RTAS/XP, for $169.00. Is there another sampler (beside SampleTank & DR-008) that I should be considering? I still haven't determined the purpose of NI having Kontackt, Impackt, and Battery. What's the difference? Thanks as always... Drew.

If you're into drum programming, Battery rocks, period. Kontakt: sample playback, imports many formats, good filters, you can also use it for drums and map out kits, has time-stretching capability, you can drag and drop your sample from browser to the keyboard mapper from within the same window. IMO, it's the best soft-sampler available at this time. It rocks. Battery: 54 cells layed out in a grid pretty much gives you a software based MPC. Extremely easy to use, each cell has an envelope window, altering your drum hits is extremely intuitive, from pitch to reversing a hit, you can use it for musical phrases but it's primarily designed for rhythm programming. No filters. However, it rocks. Impakt: Separates loops into individual slices so that each midi note on a controller can correspond to a slice, allowing you to manipulate the loop to your liking, by creating fills, variations, flams, etc. Works great for rhythm and musical loops. It's basically NI's equivalent of Propellerheads' Recycle. Don't know if it rocks as I've never tried it. For a more detailed explanation:

so battery is finally out for rtas xp. now i have to decide. battery and a couple softsynths or reason. help me out pk.

i just went to the ni website and didnt see anything of battery on xp rtas. where did you see this?

Right... "by now NOT available" Trying to weed through their difficulty with English (and who could blame them?), I can only assume that means: "as of 02/2004, it isn't available yet." In other words, it will be soon, but ain't yet. Right?

Whooopsie. Hahah. I just assumed it was available for sale since I saw this . Well, I guess I can focus my efforts on getting a soprano again...

I am very interested in Battery, could I use triggered drums to feed into battery to trigger samples of various velocity(sensitivity). I play drums pretty well and am looking for somthing to replace my studio hits in Acid Music, that I can record in my room. Also used for techno/sampled drums of course.