How else apart from panning and flipping from drummer, to audience perspective could you change the stereo field?
You can also change the mic distance for the ambient channels on the tweak tab.
What am I missing? 
Steve
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I found this but I am not sure it’s related to what you are asking?
Pan (Stereo only)
When the device is used on a stereo channel, the Pan control allows each of the 4 taps can be positioned within the stereo field.
https://www.fxpansion.com/webmanuals/bfd3/operationmanual/index.html?spatial.htm
Been using BFD since near Day 1 of its existence. Nearly 20 years? Time flies. First time on the forum. I’m a working music and media professional and rarely have the time to do this but thought this worthwhile. I’ve had my share of pain as the program has evolved and switched owners multiple times but keep coming back to it. Own and use nearly every competitive alternative and nothing beats the sound. Thanks Drew for your patience and persistence over the years. I went through and added “likes” to features others have mentioned so as to not repeat here. Here are my two biggest improvements that I’d like to see that would help me immensely when I’m under intense deadlines:
1. Ability to double click any and all value sliders or knobs and enter the value manually using keypad/keyboard (volume, panning, send levels, etc.). Purists might say “use your ears” but, as an example, I find it much faster and more precise to change values across groups and instruments by specific amounts using a keypad.
2. A better system for quickly saving changes. When I click “Save Preset”, “Save Kit”, etc. the program should remember the location where it was previously saved. Having it always reset back to my computer’s main drive or my User folder and then having to navigate through sometimes large folder/file trees is beyond tedious.
Sure, other things could be updated but for me these two things would bring a lot of joy. Maybe even included in an update before BFD4? 
Thanks for all you do!
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If you’re on macOS, you can sort by date modified when the dialog box pops up. So if you’re working on the same kit/preset, it’s very quick to save/replace the file. It will recall in which folder the preset was last saved and display as the top-most folder.
Here’s possibly another cool idea for BFD4… Maybe add some kick samples with a worn in batter head, as well as new? I was watching Steven Slate talk about sampling the Black album kit and on the kick, he added another kick sample with crinkled batter head to get a slappy kick sound. Might be neat having an option like that to blend kicks in BFD4. Maybe just a kit or two… doesn’t have to be on every stock kit.
Another option could be to come up with a good simulated algorithm with a mix knob to blend it in. Similar to tom resonance, where you can turn it on, or off. But that might not yield similar results.
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Interesting indeed, I’ve compiled a video for this, SSD5 / BFD3 Chocolate Audio Black Album comparison, it’s busy uploading to the tube, I will share when done, in my opinion, SSD5 sounds plastic, it’s good but it’s too processed as SSD always is, which I guess is good for people who know nothing about mixing or tweaking drums, not my cup of paradiddles but each to their own. See what you guys think.
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-no- comparison (jmho)
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What do you want in BFD4?
An extremely deeply-sampled, well-mixed and flexible ‘workhorse’ kit; the like of which we’ve yet to hear and which is appropriate to usher in a new generation. A real statement-of-intent!
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Nice, subjective of course but who could argue against it?
Steve
Well, the idea of a workhorse kit might be different for different people. I’m imagining a Venn diagram, with this kit straddling Rock, Pop and Funk (i.e tight), with more niche/speciality reserved for expansions.
Back in the day (A day, some decades ago) when I used to play in bands, the drummer(s) only had one kit. Perhaps an extra snare drum and a couple of extra cymbals could be changed out, but the base kit would stay the same. We used to cover tons of genres, and no one even considered having a different kit for each style. Of course, had we been solely a thrash metal or a skiffle outfit, then that kit would have been more specific to the stye in question.
I guess my answer would’ve made more sense if I framed it less about what I wanted and more about what I’d want to avoid. And what I’d want to avoid is the situation with BFD3. To me, trying to provide kits for many different styles á la ‘Jack of all trades…’, (but not quite ‘hitting’ with what’s provided), while adding some really strange decisions for presets, left everything in a huge mess (imo). I’m quite sure that it really lost out to SD, in that regard i.e the out-of-the-box goodness.
Of course, for those of us that appreciate the rawness of BFD drums, it means rolling up our sleeves and putting stuff together ourselves. I guess I’m just kinda over that, these days
In the interim period between having sold and re-buying BFD, I’ve become heavily reliant on NI Studio Drummer (Also making headway with Handheld Samples’ MAD Funk kits). Really excellent kits. Very well recorded and mixed, with pretty god choices for mixer presets. Was probably set with those, but still ‘wanted’ for that BFD thang.
Anyway…that’s enough rambling.
What I’m thinking is one main kit, sampled with sticks, rods, mallets, brushes and hands. One alternative bass drum, perhaps (Both sampled with various beaters and various dampening/stuffings). From there, I’d love for snare, hats and other cymbals to come with three choices each, going from a rock ‘slam’ down to a tight 70’s dry ‘funk’ (With barely any ring on that funk snare ).
This is just fantasy, of course. Would be good to get all users happily on the same page with BFD3, first
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I use it so much in stand-alone and there is already so much right about the product.
1 - tap tempo
2 - time signature changes in song mode
3 - full screen groove editor option
4 - flexible gui that can work well in full screen
5 - backward compatibility with older packs
6 - tight integration with vdrum/edrums
7 - commitment from InMusic
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-A GUI that has you choose the size of your kit before opening. For instance, it’ll show you classic shell pack configs–two up/two down, one up/one down, etc etc. Then, you go on to choose double or single kick. If you choose double, the samples will alternate differently to accommodate for the physical realities of playing double kicks. Then, you choose between a couple different cymbal setups, like “Simple” (two crashes and a ride) or “Pro” (for those kitchen-sink setups)
- This next one could be an update for BFD3 honestly–but I wanna drag and move the kit pieces freely on the GUI, change the size of each drum manually and cymbals need to be able to overlap. All of this for organization’s sake, because the way cymbals and toms are currently done in BFD is not clean–you add a drum and it immediately goes to a static position; if you like a setup with a bunch of cymbals, this is obviously way too messy. So we need to be able to overlap them so it looks like this:
There should also be a lock function, once you have it set where you want it.
-modelling of different types of drum heads (like I wanna be able to switch from clear and coated ambassadors to hydraulics to EMADS to powerstrokes, black dot, etc). IK Multimedia touched on it with their drum software, but it didn’t go all the way. Take us ALL THE WAY.
-No more distorted samples. BFD2 had a few too many drums that sounded crunchy and muddy.
-any kit that gets modeled must have a minimum of two rack toms and two floor toms to choose from. I hate really digging the sound of a kit, only to be locked in to having to load up the same sample and pitch it up or down to approximate what the next size would sound like.
-totally revamped and organized midi groove selection. As it stands now, that area of BFD needs some cleaning up, plus, there were so many midi grooves in the legacy BFD library that were…head-scratching. They didn’t even sound like a drummer played those grooves–it was as if someone finger-drummed them because some articulations and samples were totally unnatural.
-keep the single kit expansions coming (ala oak custom etc), priced accordingly. I’m not spending 75-99 bucks on one kit. $40-60? Now were talkin’! As someone who owns over 10 BFD expansions, I don’t wanna see BFD go under the radar for so long again. It’s too good of software to just let fall off. So if it means less huge expansions to mitigate how difficult it is to make these things, by all means, cut the workload and give us like 1 really dope kit every season from here on.
-More cymbal expansions!
-Bring back XFL for those of that missed it!
-a MONO button!!! I usually check my drum mixes in mono to make sure everything sits right and I hate having to use the mid/side thing on the master bus. We need a true mono function right there on the mixer
–someone please tell me why, why NO ONE has done an Alex Van Halen VH I to Fair Warning kit on software yet? Like jeezus, not even the snare…There’s no reason for this. BFD…here’s where you get to step up and fill in a gap that has existed for waaay too long
–better presets. I’ve never been happy with most presets in ANY drum library, and honestly, I’d love to opportunity to volunteer to do BFD4s since I love making my own and I feel like I’d be able to give people something really usable to start off with.
Here’s hoping BFD 4 ends up being at least a 500gb library!
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You could still do that with the existing libraries, test the waters and see how many users give you the thumbs up. The old fxpansion forum used to have a user preset sticky which was interesting.
Steve
How about native Apple silicon compatibility?? M1 has been released almost 3 years now, and BFD is no where closer to achieving native compatibility than it was three years ago. What will happen to those users that have an M2 mac?? They’ll have to wait 6 years??? Such an awesome tool, being left in the dust, and holding users hostage in a rosetta layer hell, when the DAW, and every other plug in became native well over a year ago! I wish I hadn’t spent so much $$ on the expansions, I would have gone to Superior Drummer. It may still be on the agenda if these devs don’t get their s&%* together. Great work…but that’s all in the distant past. What is the excuse now? The article BFD posted back in 2022 hasn’t changed. Working hard…my butt. Such a shame. Sorry for the rant…It’s super frustrating that I can’t take advantage of great updates with my DAW because BFD won’t work with it since it is Apple silicon native.
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Please send me the Beta version!?!?!??!? I use BFD in 90% of my productions, and the fact it is still not M1 native is holding me back from great DAW updates, as well as OS stabilizations. Please, please, please!?!?
I’d like to present to the forum a small preset pack for your enjoyment!
Maybe I should share some with you guys some of the players that inspired my pack: Ponta Murakami, Tony Williams, Jerry Shirley (Humble Pie), Philty Animal (Motorhead), Pete Gill (Saxon’s Wheels of Steel Album!), Neil Peart’s “Chromey” kit…hopefully you kinda get a picture here. I don’t like super washed out drums. Also, A lot of these kits can easily go from funk to metal to latin in a heartbeat. Eventually, I’d update this pack with more cymbals on each kit.
Important to note–you have to have a few expansions to make use of these: BFD 1,2,3, Dunnett Ti, Horsepower and BFD Deluxe. A lot of the presets are using 2 expansions…usually one for the shells and the other for cymbals.
Mickemowse BFD Presets.zip (117.4 KB)
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Thanks for sharing, I love those drummers you mentioned, will check these out later and give you some feedback \m/
I’d like to see a really supercharged importing of samples in BFD4,
- The destination dropdown is a huge pain in the jack, every time I import a sample I have to go and point it to the folder I am importing to again and again, it’s so tedious that it has destroyed my will to import samples. It would be nice if it just remembered the previous path.
- Hihat in the Drum Type dropdown, why was it left out to begin with? Is there a reason?
- The ability batch import samples like the velocity layers but not velocities. Like a whole folder with subfolders.
- Under the sample importer window, below the timeline, it would be really cool to have some buttons to edit that sample - Trim, Slice, Adjust Volume etc.
- When importing a sample, say a snare for example, (I know this might not be a BFD3 thing) might be the way vendors label the stuff, ir maybe the xml file?) but it would be great when pulling that sample into the kit window that it actually loads on a snare and not a cymbal, this happens with a lot of samples, snares & kicks are not too bad, but hihats and cymbals etc, hardly ever go to the correct kit piece. Even is I clear the mixer completely, then add a hihat, the sample just goes onto a cymbal. Every time.
Adding:
If I add a kick, then add a snare, sometimes (more often than not) the kick totally disappears and has to be loaded again…and again.
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Id love excellent integration with Electric drums. I’ve noticed with some expansions BFD3 is amazing with electronic drums and works much better than SD3 in those… But with other expansions the dynamics are really strange, so it would be great to ensure realistic feel is consistently kept for all BFD4 expansions.
With all that being said, id love support for positional sensing and all the features now supported with the newer digital pads for example
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