I thought maybe I should ask the dedicated BFD community if anyone has tried and got BFD running on Linux in any way, via any means necessary?
I have absolutely no idea how someone would go about even trying such a thing, but if anyone has, please share!
My other question is, does anyone else want this? BFD on Linux? Am I alone in this? If its a thing that enough people want, maybe I’ll get it ?
(Sorry, Drew! )
EDIT: Just to say BFD is literally the only thing keeping me in Windows now that Reaper is fully Linux. BFD Linux would mean being able to ditch Windows completely, and this would please me muchly.
I have absolutely no idea how someone would go about even trying such a thing, but if anyone has, please share!
On Linux, some plugins can be run with Wine. I have not try yet, but BFD may also be.
Now, VST3 SDK has capability to build native Linux binary, and Reaper on Linux has support native VST3 plugins. But currently, the VST version of BFD is based on VST2.4 SDK, so noway to run natively on Linux.
IMO, I guess BFD will not support Linux why it is difficult to support; compatibilities of distributions, system versions, drivers, audio middleware, etc. But, cannot say “no possibility” since some plugin vendors have been released official/beta Linux versions.
Sorry for very slow reply, just joined the forum - I can confirm that BFD2 actually works surprisingly well in Linux, using wine-stable under Kubuntu 22.04 LTS either as a standalone exe, or as a VST through LMMS or another Linux software that can use VST’s . I can play live, record live play via several recording softwares. I can also send MIDI data to BFD2 from several MIDI sequencing softwares such as Rosegarden. On my Kubuntu 22.04 system with standard Alsa & Pulseaudio, latency is not quite as good as I would like, but I’m not using a low latency kernel so hopefully it will improve if I switch to Ubuntu Studio or add the studio overlay on top of my base Kubuntu - I’m tempted to buy BFD3, but as I’m using Linux not Windows for music sequencing and recording I would be wary of dropping the coin for BFD3 only to find the VST and/or standalone don’t work in wine - if I buy BFD3 and it works in Linux I’ll let you know
BFD 3.45 works on Linux but the new 3.5 needs the separate license manager as far as I am aware and you can’t install that at all. About 50 unhandled exceptions when you try to do so. BFD 3.45 has a few graphics glitches as a plugin on my system but the standalone version seems perfect. The free player version seems to work fine as well. The issue moving forward will be this licensing app.
The other problem is that it appears that you now can’t download the software that does work at all due to the new licensing manager. You can’t download any software you bought if the license manager has an issue.
For sure InMusic will get no more money from me.
BFD has been an unmitigated disgraceful disaster and that even before I started using it on Linux. I’ve used it for many years. A brilliant piece of software that should be the de facto industry standard drum sampler but due to endless issues it isn’t.
I managed to get the latest version running on Linux with yabridge and Wine 9.21. Any newer versions of Wine have something changed in how they handle mouse clicks, so the controls only work when your plugin window is aligned to the top left corner of the screen. 9.21 doesn’t have that problem. From what I’ve heard, yabridge guys are trying to fix this, so we might see it working well with recent 11.x versions as well.
