So I took advantage of the 50% off sale in a big way and got a lot of expansion packs. For several of the expansion packs, the drums seem to be there, but no kits or presets! No grooves either, though perhaps some packs have no grooves?
Anyway, it seems wrong.
thanks for helping out a newbee,
Hi Aaron
Iâm guessing itâs just the expansion packs that are missing kits/presets and grooves?
Youâre right in that some of them come without grooves and presets but Iâm pretty sure they all have kits.
Can you list which packs you got and I can tell you whether they have kits and presets and weâll start from there?
If they are older packs they might still have a BFD2 sub folder so you could try going to the contents tab and hitting the, âAdd BFD2 pathsâ and seeing if any show up there.
BFD3 might need to convert them to BFD3. Personally, once theyâre converted I prefer to have them all in my default BFD3 locations and then remove the BFD2 folders.
Steve
Installation paths are weird and and arenât very well unified across the product range. Some expansions still put their presets etc in the BFD2 path. Some put them in BFD3. Some ends up installed with the expansion pack. Some of them, IIRC, put them in the User directory. And some split them into more than one of these, and in the case of BFD2/3 presets and kits, even duplicate them into more than one location and format. And, theyâre not uniform in which extra content they offer. Some donât have presets or kits. Some have grooves, and others donât.
But hereâs the rub - if you have two versions of the same preset, i.e. a BFD2 preset and a BFD3 preset, that can sometimes interfere with loading of one or both of them.
The solution is generally pretty simple, although it can be tedious. Either put the content in one place where you can find it, or add the paths where the content is to your content locations. If you have duplicates, just delete them. Thereâs a button called âAdd BFD2 Pathsâ or something like that. That will refer to the old BFD2 path, and will find a lot of the material that never got proper BFD3 presets. Other times, you just have to hunt around and see if you can find it. Most seem to put this stuff in the main system BFD3 path.
Itâs chaos, and frankly, BFD really should jump on getting this right, because I think they get a lot of support complaints specifically because of this, and ultimately itâs easy to solve. If they just put all that extra preset stuff with the audio content for the expansion pack, which is what I do manually, nobody would ever have a problem.
I have all the BFD3 expansions and some of the more popular 3rd party ones. It is true - the expansions have varying components. There are some that just have drums and not even a full kit let alone kits or presents or grooves.
I have the start of a list of what included. I made this as part of my troubleshooting to ensure everything I had was being recognized in BFD3. I could put some work into cleaning it up and making more generally usable. It has the list of products and then an X under the various components. Not sure if that would be useful to people?
I think thereâs a good argument for having 2 preset folder locations, one should be the default, (C:\ProgramData\BFD Drums\BFD3\System) (on windows) and the other should be in, âMY Documentsâ.
Any presets that I have created myself should be in MY Documents.
Itâs not just the folder locations that need tightening up but the naming of presets in the library.
Under the Library BFD3 creates a sub group called âUser Presetsâ and any presets created by me get put in there. That was fine but back in the day I used to download lots of presets that people had uploaded on the forum and have them filed under User Presets but also have another category called, MY Presets.
It should be really simple to edit the library category menus without having to go though each XML file and edit them that way but it wasnât until the brilliant BFD3 Metadata Editor was created by a user that I was able to do this.
With it I can name groups of presets so they show up in the library how I want them to, this goes for kits too but more for presets.
I had suggested a couple of times that BFD incorporate the BFD Metadata editor into BFD3 like the FLAC tool or have it as a separate utility and @BFD_Drew has said that they are hoping to have a major overhaul of the presets and folder locations either for BFD3 or BFD4 and the aim is to have no need of the BFD Metadata Editor.
If BFD3/4 allows me to name my presets into groups and sub groups the way the metadata editor does Iâll be happy. Iâll be even happier if those groups and sub groups donât all revert back to the mess they were after a content scan which is what happens a lot right now.
Iâll probably keep the metadata unless it just doesnât work with BFD4.
Steve
PS. I started this message by saying thereâs a good argument for having 2 preset folder locations, I canât for the life of me remember what that, âgoodâ reason was but I think it was something to do with systems going down and having to reformat drives but maybe not. 
So I found some BFD application libraries in /libraries (Iâm on a Mac; Mojave) and added them to my Content Locations. That seemed to work, although now I have duplicates of certain kits. But at least the missing ones are there.
Now, however, when I try to load presets they either donât load or BFD3 crashes/quits. So I basically canât access presets.
Perhaps this is the subject for a new postâŚ
No, itâs part of the issue. Iâm convinced that duplicates cause problems other than having two. Delete the duplicates, or move them to a directory that wonât be scanned. But, get rid of any that could be scanned twice - in particular if theyâre BFD2 duplicates of BFD3 presets that are also in your path.
âDelete the Duplicatesâ ⌠How? I donât see anyway to delete them, only to hide them.
thanks!
â Aaron
Theyâre just files. You just use your file explorer and delete them, or you do it on the command line.
Okay may have solved this as well⌠I removed the BFD2 Application Support paths from the Content Locations. This has definitely removed the duplicates, hopefully it hasnât removed anything I need.
I just got all the packs, and they all listed âBFD3â as the only installation option. Not sure why there would even be a BFD2 folderâŚ
Itâs one of those weirdisms that BFD accumulated over the years, given the different versions and vendors. They had to support more than one version, so, sometimes an expansion installs two sets of presets. You could also just move those files over to another location for backup purposes and re-enable the BFD2 paths. I donât like to use the system paths for anything but the core content.
Related Question: I can get Kits to work (somewhat - with some duplicates) - I havenât been able to get the Presets to workâŚat all. As some of you suggested, Iâve played around moving files - primarily from Programs (x86) to Program Data - in the latest experiment - that hasnât helped. The next attempt will probably be moving all of them to the separate drive where I have the data. (thoughts?) Also related: when I select some files to scan in my directory, it doesnât. The Contents Location search doesnât recognize anything there. Any thoughts? Thx!!