I’ve never tried BFD3, what’s lacking in BFD Player compared to BFD3?
What can we hope for in term of future expansions for BFDPlayer?
Is there any planning for releasing expansions? Like one every few months or something?
Any specic genres planned, like metal or jaz/brushes?
The mix presets in BFD Player are baked in and not editable (aside from the macros), whereas, BFD3 gives you the ability to fill any drum channel with up to 6 of any of the onboard FX. BFD3 also has more control over individual kit piece tweaks like direct to ambient mic sends, bleed, envelope, dampening, articulation volume trim and output routing.
BFD3 also has a more powerful groove editor that allows you to edit the individual grooves and their MIDI notes and drag n drop them onto a drum track inside the plugin. With Player, you can only drag the grooves into a DAW for editing and creating a drum track.
BFD3 has a full preferences section where you can tweak the audio engine, fade times for kit pieces, MIDI mapping and grooves settings and a shortcuts section.
BFD3 visually looks more “dated” than Player with the GUI, but it is more of a flagship drum sample instrument with the amount of features it has.
I would suggest looking at BFD3’s feature list and comparing it with the BFD Player.
There are just so many to list here.
There are about 3 other expansion kits for the Player that I imagine will be released soon and I’m sure they’ll be more along next year.
At some point, all expansion kits will work in both BFD3 and BFD Player.
If you click on the, ‘find more expansions’ on the bottom, you’ll see a list of what should soon be available but I have no idea when that will be but would guess early in the new year if not xmas.
Steve
I’m working on 8-10 packs for Player right now. Release date? Possibly end of Jan, but don’t quote me on that. They are not the same packs @Steve63 is referring to; which were beta “test” packs and may not even make the cut altogether. We shall see.
Feature comparison… well… we should probably put together an official grid. But:
I’m sure there is more, but this is off the top of my head.
In essence: BFD Player is for songwriters who just want to load a decent set of drums, and get going with their ideas. BFD3 is a drum workstation with a lot of complexity.
There is room for both in this world, for sure.
I love the groove editor to come up with grooves from scratch. I love the paint rudiments feature. As others have said the GUI is a little dated. I can’t wait for BFD 4 whenever is comes out …
Thank you so much for the details (and everyone else too)
Just one question I’m not sure about (sorry, english is not my first language so maybe you already answered it, just wanna be sure) : you cannot have separated tracks for all the kit pieces, right? When I open Player in Reaper, it allows me to create multiple tracks, but there’s only one global one displaying sound.
Of course I’d understand if that was the case, so people get more interested in BFD3.
I’m really interested in it tho, but I’ve read you can’t resize the windows and it’s kinda tiny? Makes me wanna wait for a BFD4, but not sure if that will ever happen…
Who knows, maybe BFD3 would still be enough despite this problem…tempted
It’s probably too early for that, but do you think there would be a crossgrade price to BF4 for BFD3 owners?
There are supposed to be 16 mono outputs and 8(?) stereo outputs in BFD Player that can route from any channel. There is at least a known bug in Pro Tools, where there are only 8 available mono outputs, so maybe Reaper has an issue as well. Have you tried routing multiple outputs from other drum VI’s to audio tracks in Reaper before and it worked?
The BFD3 plugin window can resize, but not via the normal dragging a corner of the window… there are vertical and horizontal arrow buttons that change the width and height separately. Definitely not the greatest idea to resize a window, but it does work, it just takes a few clicks to get the size you want. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t scale well with a 4K display, but I may be wrong.
Yes, I think there is going to be an upgrade price from BFD3 to 4.
Maybe explain in more detail, what you, yourself need out of a drum sampler for your productions. Then we might better be able to recommend one over the other for you. BFD Player is definitely fine if you just want some quick kits that sound good and you don’t want to get into the whole mixing of them. But if BFD3 is on sale for around $50, it’s a good deal for the quality of kits you get and the flexibility and features. That said, it will be on sale again before BFD4 comes around, so you will have an opportunity in the future to grab it for an eventual upgrade to BFD4.
If you haven’t already, I suggest watching some tutorials for BFD3 and see if you like the workflow.
Never mind, I’m stupid, I forgot something and that’s why the routing didn’t work
I was used to some plugins automatically assigning the the routes
But that’s fine, it works
Good to know for the resize and the crossgrade (I think that would be a very smart move indeed), very tempted to buy during the sale now 
As for what I need for my productions, I’m recording multiple instruments, but my main is drums, so I’m looking for just enough mics to tweak elements (which BFDPlayer already offers) and good presets, but since the effects are baked into Player, I think I’ll need to go for BF3 to dive deeper if I wanna tweak things. That bing said BFD is a fantastic tool and the big knobs above the mixer are good enough to tweak, in a way.
Just another question tho, maybe I missed it but isn’t there any way to make the routing of the individual mics to your daw automated instead of having to assign them one by one?
I mean, it is doable and I did, made a template on Reaper, but since the mics change for each preset, you have to do that everytime. That’s not a terrible bother, but it would be a nice addition if possible.
Honestly I really like the simplicity yet still having enough mic options of BFDplayer, still hesitating in which to invest haha…
Also not sure if this kind of expansion is planned, but a “metal” (I know it cas go in various direction/genres but you get the idea) expansion could draw more people in too.
On the mixer channel, there is a setting button that gives you the option to route the outputs in sequence.
It will assign your kit pieces into 9 mono outputs, and your ambient channels into stereo outputs.
Unfortunately, changing presets will set it back to it’s default.
This is something that myself and others have asked for in BFD4.
Some kind of option to have presets automatically assign to a user configuration would be ideal.
Steve
Not sure why I mixed that
Thank you so much