Anything particular you want to see from BFD3?

[Amberience]

So full disclosure, and not everyone is aware of this but I work for FXpansion. I'm on the BFD team. Yes we're very much still alive. Yes I've seen the threads about .. ahem... other plugins ... no I'm not really in a position to comment on that right now. So would rather keep this thread clean of that stuff if we can. If you really can't resist, feel free to unload in a private message to me.

I'm planning a series of videos relating to BFD3; could be mixing tips, content exploration, groove programming, etc.

But I thought I'd reach out to the community to ask if there was anything people wanted to see in a video - no sense in making videos that no-one will care about!!

If there's anything related to BFD you want to see, let me know and I'll try to cover it. If there's any feature requests, criticisms, or feedback in general related to BFD and related content, throw that in here too and I'll have a gander. Cheers!

[Mik_lo]

Amp envelopes would be nice. As would some tape saturation. At the moment it is only possible to route each kit pieces oh, room, etc to 2 auxs. I would like to route each kit piece to their own channel to process separately. More control over snare drum tuning. Tune snare top and bottom heads independently. Some sort of room modelling (size, damping characteristics). Ability to position mics.

Probably too much lol.

[Mik_lo]

Oh, one more thing. A basic drum synth would be nice to layer with acoustic drums.

[Aloysius]

One of the reasons I never purchased it was because the download version was lower quality than the physically delivered product. I don't like how the email hacking thing was handled. The guy from FXpansion who was dealing with it on kvr ended up basically defending the enemy, rather than your customers imho (for the critics, I said in my humble opinion). Plus, I don't have a lot of confidence in your company going forward. I feel like you guys could shut up shop at any moment.

[Amberience]

One of the reasons I never purchased it was because the download version was lower quality than the physically delivered product. I don't like how the email hacking thing was handled. The guy from FXpansion who was dealing with it on kvr ended up basically defending the enemy, rather than your customers imho (for the critics, I said in my humble opinion). Plus, I don't have a lot of confidence in your company going forward. I feel like you guys could shut up shop at any moment.

Okay, so I knew something like this was going to crop up. I don't mind addressing some of it, but I can't speak to absolutely everything. And I'm just one dude speaking on his own behalf. I'm not explicitly representing the company line - I'm not in a position to do that. Capiche? Groovy.

(I don't know why I'm saying capiche, I'm from the bloody Midlands!)

Now what I can *categorically* state is that the download versions are not lower quality. I know because I'm the guy who has packaged and released all of our expansion packs for the last 6 years or so. At one point in time we were dubious about shipping something as large as the BFD2 content. This was 2012 and downloading 50gb of sound content seemed like quite a big ask back then!

So what I proposed at the time was we did a 20bit version for the BFD2 content download in order to cut down on the size and make it easier for us to upload and ship it, and for the users to download it. We got quite a bit of feedback on that - not always put as politely as you have! But yes, that was a mistake. I hang my head in shame.

But that lasted for a short time and what I can categorically state is that I did not do that for any other product. Every single other one is 44.1khz, 24bit.

And now that we're in the BFD3 era, the BFD2 content was repackaged as the BFD London Sessions pack. Because that content is actually really damn good and it deserved to be kept. And it's fully 24bit. So the TLDR; I tried it for one release, it wasn't necessary and got us some negative feedback, so I never did it again.

In order to solve the problem of shipping large datasets we came up with a lossless compression format. It's still full 44.1khz 24bit quality. Shipping that much data is easy these days as well. So yeah, it's a thing of the past.

>>> insert hard-sell and references to current Black Friday promotions on the FXpansion website right now, and then couch it in friendly "community outreach officer" language in order to fool you that the giant multinational empire-building corporation that I work for is actually your best friend <<<

But no... seriously. They're all full quality. No danger there.

So I can't really address the email hacking thing because I'm familiar enough with what went down on KvR about it, and I don't really remember what happened at the company at the time. I remember there being fires that needed to be put out but that's about it.

On your last point: We're gonna be around for a good while. We're a bit quiet right now because across the company we're in a kind of R&D mode. We're beavering away on new products and new technologies. That's all I can really say on that subject. I'm very excited about the future of BFD though, that I can tell you.

So for now, whilst all the deving and busy-busy-bumblebee work goes on in the background, the BFD team is speccing up features, plotting new releases, and working on expansion pack content. We just released a new pack actually called BFD Wooden Snares, which has turned out to be one of my favourite snare packs and I'm using it in a couple of my tunes right now.

[Aloysius]

Well, it's good to talk and get some of the misunderstandings (seemingly on my part) cleared up. Thank you for taking the time.

[Burillo]

i never understood why people think of 20-bit files as "lower quality". 20 bits of dynamic range is all you're going to get even with highest of the high end interfaces - that's just physics. so no, 20-bit content is not of lower quality - if anything, 24-bit content is wasting 4 bits of precision. i am yet to see anyone demonstrating a perceptible difference between physical and download versions of BFD2.

[medienhexer]

I bought in big time but so far haven’t been able to achieve the degree of expression I heard in the sound examples with any of the expansions. Tips would be great here.

Would be nice to have more production-ready presets. I found some nice presets in a forum thread which brought me much closer to a great result than the factory ones. But the raw sounds are really very raw as a starting point.

Also, with the focused snare and cymbals expansions, I‘d appreciate some more support blending those with the factory and other expansions. I find these issues easier to handle in AD2 and SD3.

I‘m not really happy with the provided grooves, so some more insight into the integrated editor with tips about how to build grooves for an entire song instead just creating standalone loops would be nice.

As for bfd, scalable GUI

And one thing: please drop the transfer fee. I don’t intend to sell anything right now but I would be much more willing to invest more if I knew I could actually sell things if I realize it’s not for me.

[Kingston]

[way too overly complex and elaborate explanation]

I'm sorry for being dumb. Which exact product has 20bit content in circulation?

I have BFD2 on a bunch of DVD's. Is this one of them?

[Amberience]

[way too overly complex and elaborate explanation]

I'm sorry for being dumb. Which exact product has 20bit content in circulation?

I have BFD2 on a bunch of DVD's. Is this one of them?

Put simply - none of them are anymore. Your DVD's are fully 44.1khz, 24bit WAV files.

[Kingston]

Thanks, good to know.

[Burillo]

@Amberience, i think back in the day you also took some fire for not providing left vs. right hand samples like Superior Drummer etc. did - and i remember reading the BFD2 manual section about this, and thinking, man, i like these guys, they're keeping it real and don't try to bullshit me there still are posts in my KVR history defending FXPansion for this decision.

what would i like to see? a dedicated rock hihat expansion. not those Zildjian things that are too polite, but proper rock hihats.

[Amberience]

@Amberience, i think back in the day you also took some fire for not providing left vs. right hand samples like Superior Drummer etc. did - and i remember reading the BFD2 manual section about this, and thinking, man, i like these guys, they're keeping it real and don't try to bullshit me there still are posts in my KVR history defending FXPansion for this decision.

what would i like to see? a dedicated rock hihat expansion. not those Zildjian things that are too polite, but proper rock hihats.

Yeah, left hand vs right hand hits .... well... I don't see left+right hits in Superior these days!

RE: Hats. BFD Crush has a full set of Meinl cymbals in there. We went with the Meinl 14" Heavy Soundwave top and bottom. In the room it was taking my face off. couldn't play them without earplugs that's for sure. But under a microphone they smoothed out a bit (gotta get the positioning right!) and they're definitely a different flavour to your usual Zildjian offerings.

You can hear it in one of the demos I did for the pack (drums only but the full song is in the playlist too):
https://soundcloud.com/fxpansion/pro-do ... /bfd-crush

And totally besides the point, but Crush loaned us the kit for that one which was very nice of them. Unfortunately it got lost in a hurricane during transit and we couldn't find it for 3 weeks!!

[Burillo]

@Amberience sorry, i didn't mean all Zildjian hihats sound too polite. what i meant was the Zildjian expansions that you have on sale. i purchased them, hoping for more hihat variety, but most of them i just can't use because they sound too polite and well-behaved. i do like cymbals in BFD3 library - i just want more!

[Amberience]

Will definitely bear it in mind!