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FL Studio (formerly Fruity Loops) is a DAW that focuses on being highly customizable. It is mostly known for its advanced piano roll and easy to use interface, and is used by many big EDM musicians. With quick and efficient transition between its Pattern and Arrangement(Playlist) modes, workflow can be boosted to great lengths.
The FL Studio DAW employs a simplistic interface that is designed to be easily navigable, such that almost all its functions are simply laid out in the interface for the user to explore.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Intuitive piano roll
Piano roll is an FL Studio's instrument step sequencer. It is considered to be among the most intuitive and flexible tools for quickly creating patterns and manipulating all aspects of each note. A single left click inserts a note, while a right click deletes it. It's possible to mute notes, splice them, stretch them, add shuffle, etc. quickly.
The Piano Roll caters for those new to Music Theory as well, containing an array of chords from which to choose, be it a Major, Minor, Minor 5th, Minor 9th, what have you.
Pro Spreadsheet style DAW with simple & clean Dashboard Customization; your IDE for Music Production
FL Studio is a well suited DAW for those with a critical and technical thought process, similar to the way a programmer develops their ideas into front-end applications for their target audience. FL Studio is the IDE of Audio Production and comes with enough built-in packages to get the user started with new and easily up-gradable virtual instruments and effects. FL Studio is consistently updated with new methods, strategies, libraries, and overall performance that regularly get's boosted with each new version. FL Studio is built on the same frameworks of today's hot trending topics like Deep Learning and Automation which in-turn makes it readily compatible with these new techniques as we learn more about them.
Pro It's possible to run FL Studio on Linux via Wine without a noticeable performance impact
Version 12 of FL Studio includes a new Generic ASIO driver that's capable of achieving same low latency performance as the native Windows version. Instructions on how to set up the DAW to run on Linux via Wine can be found here.
Cons
Con The free trial/demo version has serious limitations
- Some functions that use save/load capability (like "Clone channel" and the "Save preset as..." menu options) don’t work in the trial/demo. This applies to the save/load files function. If you save a file in the trial/demo, good luck with opening it because unless you have a paid version of the software, your project is now locked permanently.
- Even though you can still create music in there, sometimes the instrument becomes muted automatically for a few seconds until it unmutes itself.
Con Requires advanced learning and understanding for 100% utilization.
Not so much a con, but more of a harsh truth. Sure, it's easy to start making tracks. You might even become a famous producer and still not know advanced techniques that FL Studio is capable of. But someone who has the knack for computer science, and has that sound in their head that they can't just create with their mouth or hands, they could easily hack their way into the DAW world and FL Studio makes that easy.