I’m glad you can waste a few days waiting for it to register each time you open it. I can’t. Regardless of how good it is when it works, it doesn’t work when I want to use it and after years of issues with licencing that have never been fixed I’m moving to GetGood drums. I’ll use Reaper to program tracks. I was looking at EZDrummer but GetGood sound great and area better deal.
Great stuff, I’ve only ever had to wait a minute if that, days….never.
Are you seriously saying it takes days to authorize your kits?
I have never heard of anyone having to spend more than a minute to authorise their kits.
I’m assuming you’ve contacted support about this issue?
This forum isn’t the official place for support so if you haven’t contacted them, you really should.
Steve
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Steve it has taken me two days to get my kits authorised. I don’t often get the time between work and family commitments to sit down and program drums. For the last 4 times I’ve tried I get the “Could not validate licence from the server” error. The validation simply does not work. Maybe because I live in Australia. I don’t know. All I know is when I get the time and inspiration to work on a song, BFD never fails to let me down. I’m glad it only takes minutes for some others but have a look at the posts on the issue. Other people get stuck like me.
I think this is relevant to the future of BFD. I’ve said I’m moving to GetGood drums. How many other people are going to do so because of this licencing issue. If BFD can’t fix the issue (and after 3 years it doesn’t look like they can) then people will turn to competitors. And when people investigate purchasing a virtual drummer they are going to see comments like mine and go somewhere else. I have one other friend who uses BFD. He put me onto it years ago. All my other friends use Superior Drummer, Slate or GetGood. BFD is a niche product. No matter how good it sounds if you can’t use it when you want too, then people will hear about it.
And to clarify I have raised the issue with support and its not worth it. By the time they get around to your ticket the issue has resolved itself.
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I know the server has been intermittently down lately, I tried on Thursday and it was down.
It works here every time, unless the servers are down.
Last I heard, inmusic use Amazon servers which are supposedly one of the best, but I don’t remember such frequent server issues with whatever servers fxpansion were using.
I think most of them left the building last year in protest to the licensing scheme.
I don’t like it one little bit but I’ve far too much invested in BFD3 to invest time and money learning SD3 or any other, inferior sounding kits.
The end result matters more than the process for me.
Sounds like you’re on a mission to turn people away.
As I said, I know lots of people have issues with the principle of the on line authorisation and how effective it is in combating piracy, but your issue is one I have never seen before so I don’t think I would advise people not to invest on the strength of your own ‘very unusual’ problem.
And has he had the same problems your having?
If so it might be the servers in Australia being problematic.
But what advice, if any, did they give?
Steve
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My problem is not unusual. Lots of people have this issue. You’ve replied in some of the posts above but I’m not going to bang on about it anymore. I’m angry about it but its a waste of energy now. I have GetGood and I’m going to move on.
Good luck to you Steve.
SO there’s bugs that affect ‘a lot’ lol of people, is that all you could dig up? It’s hardly a lot, if I had as much time as you did to dig that up, I’d go on to getgoodwhatever, and EZ drums and whatever else is mentioned and start digging out complaints from their forums, I bet there’s tons of bugs. It’s unfortunate that you and ‘Lots’ of people are experiencing this issue, but LOTS aren’t. And LOTS have, and got it sorted.
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My suggestion is use the alternatives you are promoting and try and get this issue sorted out, frustrating yes but probably worth it. Unless you go the lawsuit route, but if you haven’t got two days worth of time to wait for BFD to authorise how will you find time for a lawsuit?
There’s been people on here before, shouting about how wonderful all these other drum software packages are and how happy they are since they ditched BFD, for the most part I don’t think many BFD users care much for this kind of thing. It’s really unfortunate that you and some other people are experiencing this, I’ve had my fair share of issues through the years but always got it sorted in the end and I’ve also used just about every other competitor on the market, but only out of curiosity and probably because I’m a sucker for vst instruments.
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I don’t think such a complex plugin like bfd3 can easily be ported from VST2 to VST3 without a ground-up redesign in some ways. Audio outputs alone have been a big issue for just about every large scale plugin on VST3 (kontakt, superior drummer etc) where the workflows we enjoyed in VST2 forms of those had to change.
At this point if I were the BFD team I’d call BFD3 done and forget it, focus on BFD4. Maybe make the BFD4 plugin only update free for BFD3 users and charge for the new library instead?
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I suspect that maybe the plan.
Like you, I doubt we’ll see a VST3 version of BFD3, but BFD4 definitely will be.
Steve
We’re working on VST3 for BFD3 right now.
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That to me, is brilliant news.
But…but BFD doesn’t have a future 
Thanks for that Drew. Very reassuring.
But in the meantime the user base is steadily dwindling as they find alternatives without the licensing inconsistencies, and with support for VST3 and Silicon native………
Will there be any users left for BFD4?
With the free BFD Player and partnership with Alesis, I’d think the user base is bigger now than it ever was.
BFD4 will be awesome. I’m sure it will bring in many more users.
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Are you working on AAX of BFD3, too?
It seems odd to be talking about BFD4 when we don’t yet have AAX and VST3 versions of BFD3 ? That’s a strange allocation of development resources?
The main competitors had all these versions 4 years ago, as well as 7.1 capabilities in all formats
20 characters of “Yes.”
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AAX does work with BFD3, but not natively with Apple Silicon.