BFD, any luck working with it??

[iamnightfall]

I have a G5 dual 2.0ghz, running 7.3.1, 4gb ram, 2 external drives on os 10.4.8.

I've never been able to program drums in PT without making EVERY track inactive, and setting the h/w buffer at 1025 samples. I installed all the BFD sample onto a separate hard drive as well.....separate than my PT session drive and my boot drive. STill runs like junk......I hear it runs great on an HD rig.

Anybody able to use this on a similar setup as mine? I was looking at BFD2 and curious to know if its any less CPU intensive. For me its almost unusable.


thanks!!

[flommer]

Yes, it works OK for me.. I just have the LE1.5 version that came with my 002. I had problems until I put the samples on an external FW drive, but since then I've been fine. I've been considering getting the full version for a while, but there always seem to be other priorities for $200.

There are some troubleshooting tips on their website. Haven't looked in a while, but I think I remember it was stuff like limiting the number of voices/layers in BFD.... Check it out...

[Bigpit]

Hi. I just bought my first mac. A G5, 1.6 ghz, 2GB ram.. on a panther.. 002r and PT 6.9

I cant use BFD at all.. not in either 16 or 24 bit,. at least, now when I have one disk in the mac,. Haven´t tested on an external yet, though.

Before I run the BFD on a PC, 2 Ghz amd, 2 GB ram, just fine.. at the same time I had a lots of plugins, like bosendorfer, el piano, xpand, etc..

This just makes me wonder where the power is in this type of macs... :S sorry for saying it out loud.. I guess it should work with this mac system I have if everything was right? but Im not shure...

well good luck on yours, Ill try it on the external i guess...

[Slim Shady]

This just makes me wonder where the power is in this type of macs...

You do realize that Mac you bought is about 5 years old right? I still work on a G5, but it's a dual 2.5 and a year newer than yours, and even that is getting pretty sluggish. I am able to run BFD on my rig successfully though, but it still sometimes pops and clicks a little and adding any more big VI's will instantly bring things way down.

Some things you can try though: It is essential that you have the BFD samples installed on their own, high-performance drive (I believe this is covered in the BFD manual). You cannot run them off your system drive OR PT session drive and expect decent results as both drives will have too much bandwith being used already to also stream the BFD samples in real-time successfully. Even with a dedicated drive, with your system, I'm not sure how much performance you'll be able to tweak out of it. You'll also want more than 2GB of Ram (4GB or more is best), but to be honest, I really don't know how much boost you'll get, a 5 yr. old computer is a 5 yr. old computer no matter how much you soup it up, and that 1.6 G5 was the bottom of the line when it came out, so I believe it is also limited in memory capacity as well as it's low CPU speed, so it's far from the ideal computer to be using for something as resource-heavy as BFD.

As far as the OP... as I said, I can run BFD on my dual 2.5 G5 pretty well (4.5GB of RAM) if I don't have any other disk-intensive sample stuff going on (i.e. Ivory and BFD will NOT work together on my machine). To be honest though, I now usually run BFD (and Ivory) off my Muse Receptor as I prefer to leave my PT resources available to do other things, running it in PT I usually had to print my tracks before I would like in order to have enough resources to track other things at decent buffers. These G5s are just getting really long in the tooth I'm afraid, as soon as the 10.5 compatible update drops I'll be heading out to grab one of those new Mac Pros and trying a dedicated internal SATA drive for BFD and see what kind of performance different it makes.