Just don’t right-click on anything or it will disappear. Once you start fiddling and clicking around you find that piano roll editors leap and fly onto the screen, audio tracks have an unexpectedly serious looking editor, the mouse scroll wheel does awesome zoomy type things depending on whether you have Ctrl or Alt held down and shift seems to move events about. With the time line steaming along like it’s on fire the whole thing looks simply beautiful. Right, familiar territory, a project/arrange style window called “Playlist” which is slightly weird but here we have MIDI tracks where you can see the note content and audio tracks with wave shapes and also what look like automation tracks. Let’s have a go at the toolbar icons – first one is called “Playlist” – bugger me! Here we go. Right Fruity Loops, time to show me what the fuck is going on. Right, so I’ve got some quite banging bit of techno going on but the only thing on screen other than the pixie who is going to have a heart attack soon is a cool looking spectrograph. Ha – the pixie’s dancing! That’s hilarious. I opt for “D.A.T.A (FL Studio Remix)” for no particular reason and I’m treated to the same grey screen as before but this time I have a little pixie bobbing on the left and a text document of presumably Japanese lyrics. In most DAW’s you’re lucky to get one demo so this is very pleasing indeed. So, remembering my promise to get deeper into it let’s open a demo project and see if I can get FL Studio to come to life.įile – Open presents some possibilities and I opt for the “Cool Stuff” folder and discover a huge list of projects. Simple things like why are the open/close/minimise buttons on the wrong side – why can’t I work out how to resize the main window – where’s the project/arrange window – what are all these empty browser folders – how do I actually do anything? The mouse pointer has turned into a little white dot and doesn’t appear to do anything in this huge field of grey, grey and more grey. When you are used to practically any other DAW the layout of FL Studio is a bit disorientating and I find myself getting annoyed quite quickly. Let’s see if I can get to the bottom of what’s great about this eager and strange piece of music production software. However, I have a feeling in my water that cool stuff is going on in here and I will endeavour to put my prejudice aside and give FL Studio 12 a fair shake. So it is from a position of poorly disguised cynicism that I find myself looking once again upon the immense greyness of the latest version of Fruity Loops. I was encouraged to check out version 11 because it had some multi-touch elements, but I soon discovered they were pretty basic and I had never liked the look of the program which appeared to have remained largely unchanged for a decade and so being a snobby knob I gave it less than a few minutes of my time. I did hear of people using it, being creative with it but even when it evolved into FL Studio I didn’t take it particularly seriously. I have looked down my nose, ignored, patronised and generally dismissed Fruity Loops as a fun little loop making program for its entire existence. If you just want the video version then you’ll find it on our YouTube channel here: So here is the unedited and probably typo ridden full review that goes into far more detail than the video ever could. Besides when I make the videos I have to cut a lot out in order to keep the length under control. Normally I post the written version on here just to highlight the video, but I thought I should do better and make the written version more complete with proper screen shots and the like. This is a no holds barred deep dive into FL Studio 12 from the point of view of the desktop and the Surface Pro 3.
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