So here I am again waiting for B - F£$%^&*$£)£) - FD to “allow” me to use it - can’t we get a consortium together and buy the fucker from InsearchofeverylastsqueezeddollarMusic ?? If I won the lottery I’d buy it and make it open source and live off the expansion pack sales…
Rant over - should be “authorised” by now, I can get back to work.
Right there with you on the ridiculous minutes of “authorization” time, every single time I launch the program. It’s total BS that punishes legitimate customers increasingly with the more expansions you own.
Get back to work quickly, you only get a few minutes before BFD 3.5 nose-dives into the abyss again… then you can open it (again) and have a cup of coffee while you wait… Again!
BFD v3.4.5.28 doesn’t force you to authorize every time. If any of you are still on Intel, then maybe consider using the previous version. There are limitations and caveats, but I was able to keep going and even add new expansions using the software center. I think that version does work with M-series chips, but just AU/VST. Not ideal, but another option without having to completely ditch the products.
I Know you don’t want to hear this but my authorization takes about 15 seconds on my M1 Mac Studio Max… I recently moved and the authorization takes the same amount of time here as well. I’m on Xfinity internet ( not the fastest out there).
wish I could help, and I agree with you, it’s just ridiculous that any modern machine can’t authorize in just a few seconds.
M2 Pro here and it takes minutes every time and has done since beta when they were warned of it being an issue.
They claimed it would be better at launch but notice that there hasn’t been a single update since then and radio silence from the support team.
Other than InMusic trying to flog it cheap with almost continual sales and sell expansions it feels like abandonware.
InMusic don’t do actual customer support.
and now they’ve gobbled up NI, PA and iZotope. If BFD is anything to go by…
At least I’m on older versions which hopefully will continue to function with machine auth and iLok.
a deeply troubling state of affairs, to be sure.
look, i’m just a drummer – the realm of high finance is well beyond my pay grade. but even so… i just can’t figure why on earth any for-profit entity – even one with no shareholders to placate – would sink money into obtaining a clearly successful asset, only to have said acquisition wither in value through disengagement and active negligence in maintaining its worth.
conspiracy theories break me out in hives, and leaving debates about capitalism aside as well – the only possible story my paradiddle mind can conjure up is that it all smells like some sort of effort to throttle competition.
but that only makes sense if the concern doing the strangling has something of its own to offer on the market that it wants to boost to prominence, and i don’t know that that’s even the case here.
so… i really just… don’t get it. but, like i say, years of bashing away on the kit, by now i don’t get much of anything.
what i do know is that it’s terribly sad (for me, at least). and troubling, too, to consider that the evident lack of corporate interest overshadows our day-to-day activities in this one oddball sphere, to the highly-specialized extent that we all find ourselves living in a limbo dancing on a tightrope that’s continually one critical-OS update away from “poof!”
as i’ve alluded previously, i’ve been into BFD since 2 and boy were those golden FX days somethin’ in terms corporate interest in end-user engagement.
so in my version of the currently-proposed fable, anybody who wants to harbor consortium fantasies (and i’d be one if i had the scratch) immediately gets Skot and Drew and Angus and crew back – for LOTS – as first order of business.
Toontrack is in cahoots with inMusic to take BFD down for good! 
ahh, so that’s it then – how distressing. it’s always a letdown to discover that the lowest suspicions of human nature ever have validity.
although… perhaps i’m failing to appreciate a bit of salty irony in your post… always a possibility! 
Yup… two things can be true at the same time.