I also wanted to pass something along. The beta testing program is over for BFD3.5. I was one of the beta testers. I may have been selected for that because I am not a drummer and they wanted to tailor BFD to a wider market. I learned a lot about that program. When you beta test you are kind of forced to learn the program. One important thing I learned is that it is very easy to assign kit pieces and articulations to keypads on something like Maschine or another controller. And there are people with several controllers with pads and they will find it easy to quickly make key maps and save them. I set up a key map with your suggested assignments and use it as the default map that starts up when you first open the program. I can honestly say I didn’t have one crash in the whole time I beta tested. It is very stable. I did find some bugs, but they were all very minor. They have a sale on it until the end of the month for $59 and the expansions are about half off and run $24 to $34 or so. But some of these expansions are massive sizes. For example, Dark Farm runs about 90Gb. That is kind of an outlier, but still. Some of these expansions have over 90 velocity layers! The worst thing is the downloading. Their server often bogs down, and if your download fails you have to start at the beginning again. The download does not start where it bombed out. Some people report download times that take several days. I have a workaround for that and if you want to know what it is please ask and I will tell you. Other than download problems, the other downside is that there are so many features, options, and controls that the learning curve is very steep. It doesn’t help that the interface isn’t super beginner friendly, with some of the features not easily noticeable. But once you get the hang of the program then it becomes much easier. There is at least one good explanatory video on youtube, but even that doesn’t go deeply into all the arcane elements. I think some of the alleged shortcomings are really just users not knowing where to locate a certain function. But the sound quality is just phenomenal! Truly a joy to use. And there is a great variety of sounds from heavy metal to orchestral to jazz brushes to funk to electronic and way more. I love the versatility. On the minus side, the variance in volume levels from one preset to another is not standardized at all. So there is always some tweaking involved. Not a big deal for me, but it might bother some people. The check out process through InMusic is flawed. Best to buy from a 3rd party such as Sweetwater. Note: If you already own BFD3 then this is a free upgrade.
I’ve been trying to spread my efforts around several drum programs. Here are my thoughts: Addictive is pretty good, but I only have one kit so I’m not sure about the variety of kits available. Key mapping for finger drumming is OK, but not superior. NI Battery: Good for electronic, but “real” drums not so much. Key mapping for finger drumming is kind of a pain. NI Abbey Road: looks pretty but somewhat limited and key mapping is a hassle and plain bad. NI DrumLab: About 10 years old and has lots of bugs. Different key mapping procedure than other NI and very clunky. But it is kind of fun and each kit piece is made of an acoustic piece and an electronic piece blended together and you can control the amount of blend. So very limited, but fun. NI play series: no mapping available. I find BFD3.5 to be way superior to all of these and it has become my go-to program. For best performance I suggest that the data goes on a different drive than the actual program.
