I’ve been using BFD for years, stuck at v3.4, and was simultaneously yearning for InMusic to figure things out, take ownership of the software, and put out a new update, while also dreading the actual upgrade process. So let me say that I upgraded a couple nights ago and The Good was the experience itself. As others have noted in this forum, I did have to re-download all the software and all my content again–which is lengthy as I own a lot of the expansions–but I let it run overnight and addressed a few minor problems easily enough the next morning.
Pro tip: make sure you have enough disk space. I didn’t. So it downloaded like 70% of all my stuff, and I had to jigger things around on my hard drives and close the InMusic application to stop the downloads that strangely stayed “in progress” but never resumed. Weird. But overall the download and install process was simple. It all worked. I soon found I had a new stand alone player and a new version of the plugin–VST3 no less, yay!–on my hard drive.
As to The Bad, I have a couple nits to pick. First, the new BFD seems to have the same problem as the old BFD insofar as many of my kits and grooves and such are all missing by default after a clean install. I could search, for example, for the 8-bit kits and not find them at all until I did a full rescan. And to be clear, I even let the installer put its stuff in the default location on my C: drive to see how good a job it would do. I don’t keep the files there because my D: drive is much bigger, so it was only after copying everything to my D: drive, manually deleting all the existing content libraries in the BFD 3.5 stand alone application, and then manually adding the new folder on my D: drive for a full rescan that all my kits and stuff showed up. I don’t know why that is, but it would be great to have the software actually recognize all the stuff I’ve installed without rescanning everything one or more times.
The second nit I’ll pick is that I’m not real fond of the new “dark” UI. I haven’t found if there’s any way to change it yet as I’m honestly a bit lost in some of the UI changes. I used to know my way around the software quite well, but too many things have changed. And to be clear, I like many of those changes: it’s much easier, for example, to click and drag the new “handle” in the lower-right corner of the window than use those plus/minus buttons at the top to change the UI size incrementally. But I’m a bit lost at the moment. I sure hope there are some options I’m missing so far to revert to a brighter, higher-contrast, easier-on-my-old-eyes palette.
But then I found The Ugly, which is two truly unacceptable things: (1) the license manager taking bloody forever to validate my licenses at startup every single freaking time, and (2) the crashing. I hate licensing nonsense but can tolerate it when it largely stays out of my way. Yes, it was annoying to find out every 90 days when trying to open a project to get working that my BFD stuff had expired again, close my DAW, trundle off and open the authorization tool, run that, re-open my DAW, blah, blah, blah, but I could live with it because it happened basically four times a year. But this new version sucks hard, and I can’t emphasize that enough. Every single time I open the standalone it takes minutes before the UI even appears. I’m assuming that’s the ridiculous license check because whenever I open the plugin in my DAW, I immediately see the plugin window but then get to sit there for a minute or more while it shows the spinner and tells me it’s checking my licenses. This is bloody ridiculous.
Worse is the crashing. I think I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of times the old BFD crashed on me in all the years I used it. Last night alone I had four crashes in less than an hour of use. Simply opening a project in my DAW (Nuendo 14.0.20), adding BFD as an instrument track, closing that project, opening a new project, and adding BFD again as an instrument track crashes the software about half the time. I had a crash last night after a cold restart of my system doing nothing more than creating a new project, adding BFD as an instrument track, loading the first 8-bit kit listed, and trying to play a groove. BOOM! Nuendo killed. Instantly. Only a meaningless empty tiny message box with the word “error” in the title remained of my DAW. BFD positively murdered Nuendo in cold-booted blood. Yikes.
I’ve reported the crash to InMusic, so we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime I’m basically doing a cold reboot any time I want to use BFD, and I’m being super careful with it. This new version is clearly unstable and needs “more time in the oven”, so to speak, before it’s done. But I thought I’d post to reassure users on the fence, like I was, that the upgrade process at least is about as painless as one can hope. The software after the fact is a different story.
