Does BFD have a Future?

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.

2 Likes

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?

3 Likes

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.

9 Likes

That to me, is brilliant news.

But…but BFD doesn’t have a future :joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy:

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.

3 Likes

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.”

1 Like

AAX does work with BFD3, but not natively with Apple Silicon.

BFD3 was released in 2013. The fact we are currently working on our next release which will feature VST3 and AAX M1 native support, is testament to our intentions to offer long-term support.

BFD4 is a totally separate conversation.

8 Likes

This is very heartening to hear. Thank you, Drew.

Hi there, looks like I am not able to fix the problem with the kabuki-expansion myself. I can load single instruments (so far so good), but no drumset and no grooves. Known problem? Greetings from Berlin Matthias

I really, really hope we’re getting VST3 and would consider upgrading to a BFD4 if you can manage this and provide better support.

I’ve loved the plug-in generally (apart from those authorisation issues), but in recent times, BFD3 has not been ever-so-reliable on my system (MacOS, Ableton, Cubase - all latest versions). Not sure what’s causing the problems, but if I’m swapping and changing kits etc., eventually it crashes.

Player is nice, but it’s nowhere near as flexible in terms of mixing etc. Getting some of that ported over would be great.

VST and stability improvements ASAP please!

2 Likes