Image Line FL Studio 10 Review
FL Studio is one of the world’s most downloaded Windows DAWs, but can it keep pace with the competition? Hollin Jones finds out.
Price: £299.00
Manufacturer: Image Line
Website: http://www.image-line.com
FL Studio 10
Manufacturer Image Line
Price Producer Edition download $199 (boxed $299). Signature Bundle download $299 (boxed $399)
Contact Et Cetera 01706 285650
Web www.image-line.com
Minimum system requirements
PC 2GHz processor with full SSE1 support, Windows XP
FL Studio has come a long way since the days when it was known as Fruity Loops, evolving from a relatively simple loop-based program into something much more advanced. But it hasn’t lost that playfulness, even if it is now significantly more complex and capable. The focus of the software remains largely upbeat, dance-oriented music and the ethos of the developer is quite unusual. For one thing, the software is relatively inexpensive and the downloadable demos are fully featured. For another, once you buy and register it, you get free lifetime upgrades (and that includes major releases). That’s almost unheard of among DAW developers and represents a great investment for the consumer.
Fruity feelings
The software comes in a number of editions and, as you might expect, these have different feature sets according to their price. There’s a feature comparison section on the company’s website, though the number of possible combinations of features makes things slightly bewildering. Our review copy was of the Producer Edition, which has the vast majority of the features of the Signature Edition and is $100 cheaper. These two are the only versions that support audio recording.
The software itself is a fairly modest download and registration is a case of logging into the website and downloading a key file, which is quick and painless. It’s Windows-only, but runs under Windows 7, Vista, XP and, incredibly, Windows 2000. There’s 64-bit support if your version of Windows is compatible and you’ll need only 512MB RAM and 500MB hard disk space as a bare minimum. CPU requirements are not much higher, with a 2GHz AMD or Intel Pentium 3 required. Your PC will almost certainly be much newer and faster and have better specs than these, but it’s interesting to see that owners of older machines aren’t left out. Nevertheless, a more modern PC will offer far better performance. You can use the software on an Intel Mac via Boot Camp, which is true of more or less any Windows software.
Part of Image Line’s strategy with FL Studio seems to be to update it more regularly than other developers and in smaller increments. So it is that the various 9.x releases have been gradually adding more and more functionality, crystallising in this v10 release. For the uninitiated, FL Studio is a music production environment with an emphasis on loops and sequences, but it also supports audio recording and editing. It ships with a number of virtual instruments and effects and provides different ways for you to record, sequence and edit the material you play. Version 10 is not fundamentally redesigned from version 9, but there are many enhancements and refinements plus some notable additions.
In the Studio
FL Studio’s appearance is slightly toylike by comparison to some other DAWs, but this isn’t really a problem and, if anything, probably helps with usability. One thing that you have to get used to is the enormous reliance on right-clicks and dropdown menus – practically everything has a subset of features or options accessed in these ways. Some of the graphical elements are rather small, though an omnipresent tooltip window tells you what a button or a switch will do.
The program employs two main methods for recording and sequencing – patterns and playlists. Patterns are step sequences of a user-determined length containing various ‘generators’ or instruments that you drag and drop into them. These can be found in the Browser, along with all manner of other project elements grouped by type, such as mixer presets, plug-ins and even whole projects. The software can, of course, see third-party VST and DXi plug-ins installed on your system as well as the many that are supplied.
You can program using steps or the Piano Roll, which has seen some significant updates including Save as Sheet Music, the Magic Lasso, a facility to display a waveform behind the notes for better note alignment, vertical zoom, note-stretch and Piano Roll and Playlist Sync, among others. The Piano Roll Editor feels smoother and is more flexible than before, giving you better control over MIDI data. You can also record MIDI by playing it in from a MIDI keyboard and edit all manner of note properties from the MIDI CC display.
One of the Piano Roll’s coolest features is the Riff Machine, accessed via its Tools menu. This can help you to quickly create complex and great-sounding MIDI parts from basic input (including chords and arpeggios) and even add humanisation. There are other clever tools as well, such as the option to instantly draw in advanced chords by selecting a chord type from a menu. You really don’t need to be a great player to program complex MIDI parts and even if you are, you can program stuff that would be almost impossible to play.
Details, details
If you click on any instrument or generator in a pattern you open its Channel Settings window. This is a very comprehensive palette that gives you access to any parameter that you might need to edit. Samples can be time-stretched, processed and looped, synthesis parameters can be altered to change the way in which a sound is generated or processed, effects can be edited and there’s even an arpeggiator. What’s more, a virtual keyboard built-in to this window enables you to trigger sounds quickly with the mouse.
Despite seeming initially to be quite busy, the Channel Settings window is very useful for quickly editing the various parameters of a sound. When you’re dealing with a third-party plug-in with its own interface, that interface will be displayed instead and the Channel Settings window will be more minimal. There’s full automation of instruments, effects and envelopes for most things in a project, while useful window-management options prevent things getting overly crowded. That said, though, a dual-monitor setup will help a great deal, as is the case with many DAWs.
Once patterns have been created they can be placed or pasted into the Playlist section. This is essentially a linear timeline consisting of multiple tracks (like you find in most DAWs). It’s easy to use and parts can be moved, edited, copied and pasted in place. Some tweaks are evident here, too: tracks can now be individually resized, clips can be previewed in the Playlist, Playlist tracks can be locked to clips and there’s greater support for mouse wheels while editing. Overall, it’s slick and smooth and the workflow has been enhanced. Tracks are routed to a main mixer and this can now display wide tracks and waveforms, making it easier to see what’s going on. Crucially, there’s now fully automatic plug-in delay compensation, meaning that plug-ins with lookahead, for example, will work as intended.
There are a lot of plug-ins supplied with the Producer Edition, ranging from simple synths to sample-based acoustic instruments. The quality on the whole is very good, and although the focus is mainly on electronic sounds, users will find plenty here to keep them going. The audio effects are powerful and great-sounding, too. One of the major updates in version 10 has been the addition of 64-bit plug-in support as well as a new autosave feature, improved ASIO performance and better memory management.
There are also some new plug-ins, including demos of Newtone and Pitcher, for correcting and slicing monophonic sounds and pitch correction respectively, as well as Chainer, which enables you to build chains of plug-ins for instant recall.
On track
FL Studio Producer and Signature’s other main feature is audio recording –and in version 9 we found this to be a bit fiddly in practice. Nothing has really changed in this respect in version 10, so it’s still the case that you have to go to the mixer, set your recording options and then capture your take. That might not sound complicated – and indeed it works perfectly well – but it feels like several clicks and button-presses too many, especially if inspiration suddenly strikes and you need to get something down very quickly.
The problem is that material is sort of created outside of the Playlist then arranged in it – so unlike in most DAWs, you don’t just hit record-enable on a track and go… it’s more complex. You do get used to it but it would be nice if the Playlist felt more like a canvas for direct recording rather than just arrangement. In fairness, there is a ‘quick record’ button that cuts out some of these steps and lets you record to the Playlist or to Edison, but the process could be more streamlined. There are unlimited audio tracks and multitrack recording if you need it. Recorded or imported audio can be freely edited and you get the Edison wave editor plug-in for this, which is very capable.
FL Studio 10 is an update focused largely on workflow and under-the-hood improvements, but for existing users it’s free, so the decision to upgrade is a no-brainer. For prospective users it’s an interesting proposition. It’s certainly very good at electronic music – indeed, possibly the best DAW we have seen for its combination of instruments, step sequencing abilities and general workflow.
Other DAWs have these, of course, but when you fire up FL Studio it just makes you want to create electronic music – and it’s not all that hard to do. It really steers you towards pattern and loop-based music and is honestly hard to beat for sheer enjoyability as far as those styles go. The audio recording features work well but still feel a little bolted-on and will take some getting used to for anyone more familiar with the likes of Cubase, Logic or Pro Tools, although perhaps not Ableton Live. The effortless nature of MIDI programming doesn’t yet extend to the way audio is handled, although we suspect that fewer people will be using the software for recording symphony orchestras than for knocking together house and dance music. Still, it’s an excellent tool and a worthy – if perhaps not game-changing – update to an already very interesting DAW. MTMFL Studio has come a long way since the days when it was known as Fruity Loops, evolving from a relatively simple loop-based program into something much more advanced. But it hasn’t lost that playfulness, even if it is now significantly more complex and capable. The focus of the software remains largely upbeat, dance-oriented music and the ethos of the developer is quite unusual. For one thing, the software is relatively inexpensive and the downloadable demos are fully featured. For another, once you buy and register it, you get free lifetime upgrades (and that includes major releases). That’s almost unheard of among DAW developers and represents a great investment for the consumer.
WHY BUY
Great fun to use
Perfect for making all kinds of electronic music
CPU- and memory-efficient
Excellent selection of instruments and effects
Flexible: hosts plug-ins and works via ReWire
Many productivity and workflow enhancements and tweaks
Advanced but easy to use MIDI programming capabilities
Unlimited audio tracks
Attractive upgrade policy
WALK ON BY
No native Mac version
Audio recording and editing could be made easier
Verdict
A solid update to a fun and interesting DAW that’s ideal for making electronic music. It also comes with a surprisingly generous lifetime update policy.
★★★★★★★★★ (9/10)
Score: 9
This review first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 98
Filed under
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