BFD1 User here! Thinking about jumping into the BFD3 upgrade on M1 Mac. Yay or nay?

Can’t believe it’s been so long since BFD1 came out, but here I am using an M1 Mac that won’t work with 32-bit instruments, and thus, I am trying to decide to either upgrade form BFD1 by grabbing BFD3 for $50 or to just move in and migrate to another platform.

I have a few questions, if anyone has already been around this block, as far as where my expectations are:

1). Can I still use the same instances of BFD1 kit instruments that I use/used with BFD1, in Logic, with BFD3? Or do I have to manually reconfigure and reprogram the original samples into BFD3? Part of my reason to upgrade to BFD3 would be the convenience of compatibility; but if this isn’t in place, it would be good to know. If I have to change my BFD1 legacy kit sounds in my older Logic projects that use BFD1, then this would put drum instrument competitors at an equal footing (aside from price) with BFD3.

2). If I CAN use BFD1 legacy kits/instruments, how do I import them into BFD3? Can I download the exact same legacy kits directly through the BFD3 merchant website? I have the original BFD1 CDs somewhere, but I’m not sure I can get the installer on them to install onto an M1 Mac. If I do need the original discs, perhaps I could manually move the sample and instrument files from an Intel BFD1 install and then manually move import them to BFD3 for complete compatibility with my legacy sounds and settings? Which way would I have to go about things in order to easy get my original BFD1 kits (and plugin settings) into BFD3?

3). In general, how is the experience with BFD3 running on M1? Am I asking for a world of pain or is it pretty smooth? Are there any hoops to jump through? Do I have to open Logic Pro X in Rosetta 2 mode or anything else like that? Any other info that I probably would want to know, as an OG FXpansion BFDrummer in general, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time, drummers!

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In general, how is the experience with BFD3 running on M1?

Today’s state on a M1 mini Big Sur 11.6 :

Standalone
Screenshot_04_11_21__08_44

Logic with Rosetta
BFD1_User_here__Thinking_about_jumping_into_the_BFD3_upgrade_on_M1_Mac__Yay_or_nay__-BFD3___General_Discussion-_BFD_Forum

Logic without Rosetta
Cursor_and_Untitled_13_-_Tracks

You may select what you like most.

From BFD Support by email on June 29 2021:
“I am afraid that BFD 3 is not yet compatible with Mac’s running M1 ARM chips. We are working on this update and it is forthcoming, however I do not have an exact timeline for when. Sorry for any inconvenience, have a wonderful day.”

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I have to be honest here, read around the forum and see people’s experiences. Do they look positive to you? I’m talking from a PC perspective, but you’ll see Mac users too and no-one seems to be having a good time with BFD3 as it currently stands.

Yes I want BFD3 to improve so the more people that buy into it the better it should hopefully become, but I can’t honestly suggest you use you hard-earned money on this at the moment. If you need something urgently I would have to suggest something else. As it is, it’s a frustrating experience for many (most?) users.

I still think BFD3 is the best of the real drum plug-ins which is why I’m sticking through these rough times. I also have no immediate projects that require it so I can bide my time. If I was not in this position I would move to something else like Slate or Superior.

Also, unlike BFD1, BFD3 has to “phone home” every 30 days to make sure you’re not a criminal and if you aren’t connected to the internet at that time all your BFD software will be deactivated. Something worth considering as to whether you’re happy with that scenario or not.

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We’ve got an M1 build in development, but it’s a bit of a way off right now as we are fixing bugs in the software and in the authorization system. Important to state that forums aren’t entirely representative - remember, we have tens of thousands of users, and most of them are getting on.

However there have been some snags with our authorization system that we are currently working on. If you run into problems our support team are here to help, and worst case scenario you can ping me here on the forum and I’ll assist too - I’m always around to help people with various things.

More broadly speaking -

The BFD3 world is very different to the BFD1 world. Your projects won’t automatically convert over to BFD3; and in most cases it will be better to rebuild them from scratch.

BFD3 will load a BFD1 preset and a BFD1 kit, so you can definitely save your stuff out of BFD1 and load it into BFD3; a few tweaks here and there and you will be able to get back to where you were.

The playback engine of BFD3 is a bit different to BFD1, so the ranges of velocity layers and the order of them and how they’re played back will be different. But still high quality.

The newer libraries and expansion packs are much more detailed than the BFD1 era packs, and we now use a lossless compression engine to fit more channels and more velocity layers into the drums, which equates to more detail in the sound.

Those Logic crashes above are not typical and need investigating.
@peter_ostry I’ll PM you so I can get some logs.

Don’t do it unless you are a masochist

Migrate away if you have a brain

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Bad news travels faster than good news.

While the forum may not be representative of the amount of people having problems, its very representative of the kind of total work stopping and installation breaking problems that one may face and that more and more people are joining the forum to moan about.

Atm, its quite a difficult proposition to recommend upgrading to a version that may shut itself down at any moment into a non functional state, without any notice, and lose all the kit work thats been done in that project up to that point.

@BFD Personally, I’d wait to update BFD until these authorisation issues are definitely fixed.

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I wouldn’t for a second assume that people not posting on here means that they are “getting on”.

Everyone that I know with BFD is having problems with it, none of them have posted here. BFD is currently broken, not for a few unlucky people.

Maybe it will get fixed, maybe it’s moving to a subscription model (which could explain why the licence manager has been changed to call home every 30 days), maybe you’d be okay with that, but currently there are far to many maybes to recommend anyone spend any money on this software

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Even if thousands of people were “getting on” (have they all written in to you to say so? Thought not), the 30 day criminal check has yet to be addressed with some honesty and transparency.

What is the reasoning behind this? To eventually go subscription? To check if I’m being a good citizen? What exactly? Because at the moment it stinks as a system, no-one likes it and you will lose customers old and new over this.

If BFD3 ever gets to a working state where people might be considering buying it, don’t you think we’ll be over all the plug-in forums to make sure potential new users know about the 30-day criminal check? I certainly will, because it may not be obvious to new users that’s what is happening - it’s not in the original Ts&Cs or system requirements - and frankly I find it disgusting that you’ve foisted it upon us loyal users in such a furtive manner.

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OP here. Wow. What happens if you cannot get online to authorize within thirty days?

I have offline production machines that I’m not using to check my emails.

That’s insane and a huge turn off to someone who is on the fence.

Has this been addressed by the devs? Is it supposed to go away?

What happens if you can’t authorise BFD? You have a plug-in that is completely unusable. Expansions that disappear from your authorised expansions list. BFD launches and kindly pops up a screen telling you to authorise everything, absolutely no way to use it even as a demo mode.

How is this being addressed? Nothing concrete yet, most people’s authorisations seem to have ended 30th October and had to be reauthorised. Mine did. It is supposed to be being ‘tweaked’, but quite what that means who knows? I heard it was going to be 90 days rather than 30, but that still doesn’t eliminate the underlying issue.

Certainly the word ‘tweaked’ it is not an indication of BFD Drums wanting to eliminate this feature completely - we’re not even sure why it was introduced in the first place and it wasn’t even mentioned by the devs until people started noticing who had offline machines etc., they just snuck this ‘feature’ in there.

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Yikes. Nothing makes you consider being a criminal like being treated like one.

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Yeah. The irony is if you’re a legit user you’d have to use a crack to keep using your paid-for product. Ridiculous scenario. Not that I expect anyone to bother cracking such a buggy bit of software.

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Yeah, the cracking teams aren’t bothering with BFD3 anymore. They seem to be focused on SD3, EZ Drummer, et al. I haven’t seen a crack for anything BFD related for years.

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The deal right now is that BFD License Manager will need to go online once every 90 days to validate and refresh your authorizations. This does not affect your license ownership, and your authorization will refresh without problems if your hardware hasn’t changed.

As the product owner, I am representing you guys in every discussion and meeting we have about the authorization system. I am flying the flag for more transparency and better features and a less complicated and more user-friendly experience.

Once I know more, I will post here on the forum about it.

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I have had good times except for 1) the first day of 3.4, when the login nag was not dismissable by a password, allow, deny, nothing. It quit the next day. Or 2) the other day when the ‘cannot retrieve your list of products’ crops up, which really upset me after a bad couple of days. Otherwise it simply works the same as it always has, which is 99.99% except for my niggle with host automation, which I have adapted to and work accordingly (keep as close to a single map as possible).

So the report of, it’s borked on the mac as well is just not true here. I was quite livid on this latest SNAFU as it worked in the morning but in the late afternoon pulls this sh!t, and I hadn’t done anything to anything on the machine. I have BFD3 in every project for a year and a half.

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It’s not buggy on the Mac. The authorization scheme is the problem, and IME it’s egregious.
It puts Drew and other team members that aren’t corporate in a bad spot. I am still seriously unhappy with ‘inMusic’, which is but another sign of a world going to shit.

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But I don’t want to be Pollyanna about this. I took out a support ticket right after a rant or two here, and…
whoever it was was not paying attention to my words. It was do the login/logout bit, restart the machine, make sure it’s the latest update spiel, all the stuff anyone already has unless they’re brand newb.
I told them this didn’t work and that I had fixed it; and got a second email where the indication they weren’t following my words applies.

I figured I had to fug with it some and deleted application caches. I never found a specific BFD Drums cache of any kind so it was all applications caches, which I wasn’t real comfortable with. But it made the thing behave and nothing else appears to have an issue.

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Uh, MAYBE. BFD2 presets do NOT load into BFD3 accurately. I’ve reported it repeatedly and BFD Drums have not corrected the bugs. I don’t know if the same bugs exist when importing BFD1 presets, but I would recommend extreme caution, because you might find the same situation I have.

HAVING a feature is completely meaningless when it DOES NOT WORK.

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I have had multiple bugs get in my way on the Mac. Crashing of BFD3 and BFD2 (yeah, BFD2 never crashed until BFD3 was installed; go figure), BFD2 preset import, UI bugs…

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This has been posted about a bunch. It seems like InMusic have some auto reply thing that is really more frustrating that it is any where near being of any help.

Just read the emails, support, thats the whole point!