I’ve been a BFD user since v1. With the all recent acquisitions, I’m starting to feel like BFD is that Tom Hanks character in The Terminal… someone trapped in limbo without a home country. I didn’t even know that this site and forum existed until I had bug. I was looking for help on fxpansion and then roli, both of which were dead ends.
There should more communication from BFD to the customer base about what’s going on. Something like, “Hey here’s what went down these last few years. We’re now at bfddrums.com. All of your fxpansion license keys will continue to work. We’re committed to BFD and we’ll be releasing our new platform in the next X months. and as a thank you to all our customers over the years, here’s a coupon code you can use in our store…” or something like that.
I write music for a living. So the software I choose is directly connected to keeping a roof over my head. I’ve been burned by software companies that go out of business, and my sessions no longer open. I’m trying to be smarter about which software company I give my money to. I hope that BFD has a long and healthy life ahead of it. I think more communication from BFD to the customers would give me more confidence when deciding where to spend my money.
There was a whole series of mailings that went out in 2020 and 2021 about the acquisition and about the migration process. There’s a button in the FXpansion user-area for users to migrate their serials across to their inMusic Profile (and it creates one for you if you don’t already have one) and we have an entire knowledge base on the website that covers things in a lot of detail.
FXpansion license keys won’t work. People have to be using inMusic ones, as well as the inMusic version of the software. It isn’t precisely how I envisioned things going down, but we had to jump through a lot of GDPR hoops. We were not legally able to just take everyone’s account details from FXpansion and just copy it over. You can thank the EU for that!
As an aside; has anyone actually seen a reduction in the amount of unwanted emails since GDPR came into force a few years back? Coz I haven’t!! Absolute waste of time. Blergh.
I don’t want to sound too salty, but being awake at 3am talking to users is starting to have an impact on me. I may need a holiday
One thing I am trying to get off the ground is a development blog. Where we can people informed of our progress on various projects. But it is a little early for that. One day, one day…
I did receive an email from FXpansion on the migration over to BFD Drums/inMusic. The BFD Drums website goes into detail about how you can upgrade from earlier BFD versions for $49.99.
inMusic did offer a free expansion/coupon to be used on their website for those migrating, or purchasing an upgrade from BFD1/2/Eco and FXpansion also mentioned this.
That said and as it’s been regurgitated over the past year, it was definitely a bit of a train wreck, as Drew has even alluded to.
Thanks for responding so quickly. I appreciate the massive undertaking it is to keep BFD up and running. I want to do everything I can to keep this software going. I want it to succeed. The fact that you are responding to me and are a presence on this board is really encouraging. Thank you.
You should know that besides the forum account setup, I don’t have any emails from inmusicbrands.com. Zero. I never got anything about the acquisition or migration process. (this is not a junk/spam issue. I searched everywhere. Last notification email from fxpansion, roli, or inmusicbrands was in 2019). I’m mentioning this not to complain, just to let you know about the experience of an end-user. I wonder if there are more users like me who simply didn’t get the notice.
Either way, I appreciate your response and will start the migration process now.
Just re-read your message. Are you saying that under GDPR, when a company acquires another you don’t get their customer information? So any migration info would have come from fxpansion. And if that doesn’t happen, you’re just waiting for existing customers to find you. Is that right?
That’s quite a hoop to jump through. I had no idea (I’m in the US).
I can understand you very well, but after 18 years of working with BFD as a customer i can expect that a software, at it´s minimum, can be opened and be closed…as long as this is not offered i will never open up BFD again…i was calmly waiting for better times…but now i do not believe in this anymore…very frustrating…and i lost some money on this product…it´s strange to me that toontrack and xln audio has much better software…much better…the only advise i can give to the really friendliy guy at BFD is…MAKE YOUR PRODUCT WORK !!! Nowadays there are better Products that work, like Mododrums, with a little editing it sounds really good, or use hardware or the Roland TD Modules or Two box…
In all these 18 Years, i regularly had to rescann the libraries, add on´s where not found. After a while i did not even thought about to open it…because i knew i had to spent time to make it work properly. Under FXpansion it took more than 3 Weeks to get an answer from the outsoucred support.
After the emigration process, i got really good help from the support…it seems to work. After 3 Weeks, i really did not change anything in my Macbook…i opened BFD…“Please Contact the support”
BFD is the best sounding, useless product on the market. I made a whole porduction with BFD, and guess what…40 % of the time was spent on BFD, 20 % of it to make it work properly. I know what i am talking about, i bought 20 add on´s and accepted all this “issues” because the sound was great, but now, i do not accept any more these “issues”. Every other product offers a prefessionel workflow, and the software is working. BFD does not…until today…so i can expect after 18 Years of usage that program opens up properly…
Well sorry to hear that, my story however is somewhat different.
I’m on Windows and always have been. I’ve been with BFD from the start, I have 59 expansions and everything works fine, always has done. I had a little bit of a wobble when InMusic took over, but I cleared that up, and here I am, having the time of my life at 58 years of age(trying to catch my expansion count)
Same here, never had an issue, I think a lot of the problems people face come with the way they install the product and set up their libraries, not everyone but a good percentage of them.
Had my fair share of issues but have always managed to resolve them without help from the support team. I agree that certain things could be way better, and the team are working on them. I’m not saying there are no problems, but from messing around over the years with different configs, I found that most of the problems I faced were self inflicted lol.
Rock on BFD, we are getting there slowly but surely.
Sounds like you’ve been running into the issues with robustness in the authorization system. That was causing authorizations to expire because some parts of your machine spec were changing under the hood, and the authorization system was thinking it was a different machine.
We’ve tightened this up and in the next version of BFD3 (out today, fingers crossed!) should be much much better in this regard.
I have not re-installed BFD since upgrading my system, given the issues I was having on my old system as well as the new authorization protocols. If the new version to be released today has improved upon the recent past - and actually works on M1 Macs I might give it another try.
3.4.4 will work with Rosetta, and 3.4.5 will work with M1. 3.4.5 is already in development, and needs to go through the QA cycle before it can be released. I’m hopeful that it will be June/July.
BFD3.4.4.29 is now available. You can download it through the current BFD License Manager. But please make sure you close License Manager before installing it, as it needs to have LM closed in order to update it.
EVERYONE will need to re-authorize their products. But this build should resolve all of the instability in this area of the product.
Please let me know if there are any problems that crop up.
What users need badly is strict instructions on how to protect/isolate their libraries and mappings - before they sensibly wipe everything else to perform a clean install of the updated software.
Not all of us are Mac experts , and as a last-resort protocol - the above method would at least work 100% , so long as the BFD server is running.
I’ll just say that, before doing a major wipe like that, or even a build/LM update for that matter, it’s wise to backup your system beforehand, so you can always get back something that wasn’t supposed to be deleted.
