FXpansion BFD Supplemental - Manual (Page 24)


you should be okay. Also, on Windows platforms, make sure that the drive is running in
DMA mode (check your primary and secondary hard disk controller settings in
Control
Panel/Device Manager). Also, try looking at the various cache and buffer settings in the
Options panel.
You can try the following workarounds to get around hard disk subsystem bottlenecks:
• Install BFD on a separate drive to the operating system and any audio tracks you may
be using.
• Use an external firewire or USB 2.0 drive. This is especially useful for laptop/notebook
users, as the internal hard drives on these types of machines are usually very slow
compared to their desktop equivalents (4200 rpm versus 7200 rpm). An external drive
should be capable enough to deliver the required amount of data in time. To give you
an idea of the transfer rate required, a particularly heavy scenario when using BFD
would need around 15 MB/sec. This means that a firewire or USB 2.0 drive which
typically delivers 30 MB/sec would be perfectly adequate.
It is also possible that you have insufficient RAM to run BFD at full quality. Please see the
next item for more details on using BFD on low-memory systems.
• What can I do to reduce the amount of memory used by BFD?
Even with disk streaming, BFD requires a large amount of memory to prebuffer all
its samples to ensure low latency. In other words, BFD stores a short section of each
sample in memory to play while the rest of the data is delivered from the hard drive.
512MB is the bare minimum for running a standalone instance of BFD. If you start
creating huge 18 piece Kits, or if add a resource-hungry sequencer and other plugins into
the equation, the memory requirement is increased.
If you have a shortage of RAM, there are a few things you can do in order to get better
performance:
• Unload unused hit types
Use the Unload function in the Hit Options panel, remove any Hit types from any Kit-
Piece which you may not need. For example, if you intend to play BFD with an e-drum
kit, you won’t need snare drags and flams, and you may not require both tip and shank
hihats. This can reduce memory usage drastically.
• Limit the velocity layers
For example, some of the BFD snares have well over 40 hit layers in a number of Hit
types. If you are content with 20 velocity layers, you may halve the amount of memory
used by your snare.
• Use 16-bit Mode
When this setting, located in the Options panel, is enabled BFD uses 16-bit audio
instead of 24-bit, effectively halving the RAM requirements for the Kit. The quality
difference is very small. You can also use it as a preview mode during composition,
and change back to 24-bit during the final mix if your sequencer is capable of offline
mixdowns.
Chapter 5: Troubleshooting BFD supplemental manual