London Session Pack too loud on BFD3

Hello people,

I’m questioning all of you because I got the London Session in exchange of my BFD2 serial.
I never tried BD2 content inside BFD3 but I noticed that it sounded really loud compared to the rest : big ambience and the sound level peaked really fast.

Does anyone knows how to balance this pack with the rest ? I found a script that was supposed to edit the pack and set everything to -5 db but it didn’t work. Can I do it manually and permanently on the files, so that I don’t have to tweak it everytime I load a kit piece ?

Thank you guys !

London was really loud. Always was. I’m not near my drive now, but IIRC there’s a line in the tweaks.xml files can be used to adjust the volume of each kit piece, individually and permanently. I believe I did this at some point. Your script almost definitely did that.

Yes the script is intented to change the tweaks.xml files.

I downloaded Python but it doesn’t change anything. Maybe that’s because they say it’s for Python 2 and I have Python 3 but that’s a bit silly…

So I tried by editing manually the line “BFD2ArticTweaks name=“BFD2ArticTweaks” trim_dB=“0”>” from every Orange County Snare articulation, putting -5 instead of 0 but it didn’t change anything… I must do something wrong.

The thing is that I don’t know if I have to manually edit the rest of the files, like for the “hit” articulation, below the BFD2ArticTweaks there are 33 lines like this :

BFD2VelLayerTweak velLo=“0.0333333” velHi=“0.0666667” dbTrim=“0” loudness="-62.9682" fileName=“master02.wav”

Maybe I need to change the “dbTrim=” in every lines, in which case it’ll take forever…

Off the top of my head this should all be valid in Python3, and I don’t see why it should fail. I’ll play with it a bit when I get a chance.

I wouldn’t try to manually change the files. That would just take forever, and you’ll probably miss one. Bettter to fix the script.

Thanks for your answer,

Yes I don’t know what goes wrong, the explanation is really simple. I put the .py file in the London Directory, when I launch it, a window appears for less than a second without saying anything and nothing has been changed. I don’t know what to do.

But for what I can see, BFD2 content is really hard to mix with newer sounds…

Mac or Windows? I’d run it from the CLI, just to see the output.

I’m on Windows 10
I appreciate your help !

Ok, so I found a Python 2 installer that worked on Windows 10 and it worked successfully. It was a compatibility issue.

Still, thanks for your answers.

Cool. Yeah, it should be pretty straightforward.

is loud a bad thing? lol

Well, when loudness cause clipping and crackling noises it is a bad thing…

I remember when I first bought BFD2 in 2008 that it was LOUD and all the levels were red lining.

I thought to myself that the developers could have done a lot better than to let something out of the gate that was annoying to listen to.

I suspect that maybe the samples were also recorded hot - or at unity - when perhaps others have lower peak levels. Not sure.

I solved the issue by creating kits with the mixer volumes down about -6db or so. That worked. Then I started using Slate Drums as well. There’s always a give and take, it seems. Nothing’s perfect.