Hey been there done that, after 2 months of wrestling with BFD on M1 Pro, I got it to work and I am a bit surprised that this isn’t the go to approach, while painful, it does work, Drew has this in another response, I happened to find it after spelunking through a bunch of posts and thought i would try it after a lot of PAIN trying to get BFD to work on M1 PRO.
All in all it appears BFD runs just fine on M1 PRO under Rosetta, on my M1 Pro my DAWs are using 10% of CPU with huge projects, it is really nice, and I am using both audio units and aax plugins.
I hope this helps someone out there, I wish I had just done this in Dec. when I loaded my Mac, I have tried everything and nothing worked until this, I love many aspects of BFD, I use SD2 and NI Abbey Road to, and they are great also, BFD just has some samples in it that really have superior resonance IMO, …and I have about 100 projects where i have used it so, in a way, I am tied to anchor so to speak,
This looks complicated but it is actually pretty easy, you just have to navigate through your system, find ALL the remnants of the old BFD install(s) things and MOVE THEM TO TRASH. It shouldn’t take a lot of technical skill, just patience and diligence. It is all point and click.
It would be really great if someone, could create a script to do the removal, that would just run through the list and move to trash, I imagine would need to be run by Administrator level authorization to do the Deletes. I am no programmer.
NOTE: I include specific instructions on how to remove the remnants of BFD at the end of this POST.
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Remove ‘ALL’ remnants of BFD programs/plugins etc. (see below for how to do that), I don’t mean to remove your content folders which hold your grooves and expansion packs, keep that where it is, just the applications and programs etc, follow the instructions specifically.
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Once you have everything removed per the instructions below, shut down and reboot,
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Now go to the Inmusic site, then to BFD, and download the current license manager
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Bring up the BFD License Manager
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Log in to InMusic per License Manager Instructions
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This should populate the license manager with all your current registered products (including BFD3) you will likely need to click authorize on each of the products you have, e.g. expansion packs, groove packs, etc.
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in the license manager start at the top and install each of your BFD products, this will result in a download for each at the end of which you have to hit the ‘PLAY’ button on the far right once the download is complete.
NOTE: once you press the play button you will be asked a series of questions, one of which is location for the content. You can choose any location but I chose the exact folders where my content is already, so I wouldn’t end up with duplicate space used up. I keep all my sample content on Samsung S7 external drives.
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Do the download and install of each of the products you own. NOTE: each download and install for expansion packs takes approx. 30 minutes the whole thing took me about 3 hours, I watched a movie
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Once you complete that, I would do another shut down and reboot for good measure
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Once rebooted launch BFD3 stand alone,if it doesn’t take you there immediately, go to Tools then Set up Content Locations,
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Go to each of the content locations listed and click on activate, I have a large number of groovepacks and expansion packs so this was tedious but maybe took another 30 min.
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Test the standalone BFD by trying to load a kit and be sure it works, you hear sound, you can see the presets and kits you expect etc.
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Before going to your DAW be sure your DAW is opening under Rosetta, (Pro Tools and UAD LUNA which I use, have both now come out with Native versions that default to Native) BFD is NOT Native it must run under Rosetta, to make sure of this open a new FINDER window, click on Applications, find your DAW app in the list and right click on it (not left), a window will come up, Choose “GET INFO”,
then you will see a window that has a bunch of info about the app, look in the middle of the window and you will see a check box with 'OPEN USING ROSETTA", Make sure that box is Checked for any DAW you plan on using BFD with.
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Go to your DAW, launch it and load a session with BFD in it or do a test session and load BFD, hopefully this works,
HOW TO COMPLETELY REMOVE BFD FROM YOUR MAC (except the content)
be methodical about this, any one of these is missed and you may be wasting your time, i took a screen shot put it in a note and checked them off one by one and then went back and double checked every one before going back to step 2 above. (Please forgive me for TYPOS, if any, I had to retype this because couldn’t figure out how to paste Drew’s instructions from the other post.
NOTE: these are not commands, they are locations,
as an example on the first step, all you have to do is start with Mac HD then click on Users, then click on your user name if there is one, then click on Library then click on application support, then click on BFD Drums and the right click on BFD3 and move to trash, there is no keying in of commands here
IMPORTANT NOTE: when I say ‘Delete’ below i mean “right click on the item and the select 'Move to Trash”
Delete - Mac HD/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/BFD Drums/BFD3/
Delete - Mac HD/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/com.inmusicbrands.softwareunlock
(note I could never find the one above on my system)
Delete - Mac HD/Library/Application Support/BFD Drums/BFD3/
Delete - Mac HD/Applications/BFD3.app
Delete - Mac HD/Applications/BFD License Manager.app
You must also remove all BFD plugins from the plugins locations:
AAX - Delete - Mac HD/Library/Application Support/Avid/audio/Plug-ins/BFD3.aaxplugin (this is a folder)
Audio Units - Delete Mac HD/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/components/Bfd3.component (also delete Bfd2.component) if it is there
VST - Delete - Delete Mac HD/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/VST/Bfd3.vst (also delete bfd2.vst) if it is there
NOW DELETE THE OLD FXPansion FILES
Delete - Mac HD/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/FXpansion/BFD3
Delete - Mac HD/Library/Application Support/FXpansion/BFD3
Delete - Mac HD/applications/BFD3.app
Delete - Mac HD/Applications/FX license manager.app
Also make sure you delete any Fxpansion plug-ins and or any remaining plug-ins related in any way to Fxpansion or BFD from the 3 Plug In locations described above.