Recs.
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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 a quick and efficient transition between its Pattern and Arrangement(Playlist) modes, the workflow can be boosted to great lengths.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Free lifetime updates
With the producer or signature bundle, updates are free forever.
Pro Intuitive piano roll
Piano roll is a 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 Sample/MIDI Manipulation in the Playlist Mode
The Playlist mode comes with various tools for cutting out sections of a sample, midi arrangement, or otherwise. One can also clone, mute, solo out, and stretch a sample by any degree, although the sample's key will change.
Pro Perfect for engineering because of the production style workflow
The workflow for creating beats in FL Studio is among the fastest which make mixing and mastering a breeze inserting plug-ins and routing on the mixer.
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 Browser is archaic
Every time it has to refresh, it closes the entire menu. So if you just navigated several dropdowns to find an automation parameter of a third party plugin and you want to automate a second parameter, you have to navigate back to that dropdown all over again. Searching within the browser is a slapped on feature that only shows you a single result at a time, and you have to press a hotkey to cycle through them one by one. Really, your browser in FL is the Windows File Explorer, or Finder in OS I assume. The FL Browser is workflow molasses and should be avoided at all costs except to find samples you already know the location of.
Con Audio recording not as good as the other DAWs
Recording audio is always a problem in FL Studio.
Con Bad sound for expensive piano plugin
Rendered using the same MIDI note and compared it to the render on other daws, it's really bad.
Con The soundfont player will trash your projects, no 64-bit version available
Remember that nice project with a soundfont in it ? Yeeeah, load it again and prepare to face stuck MIDI notes and a trashed project.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Con Not great for Mixing
Every channel should have input gain controller and extra plugins should be added for more creativity.
Con No way to copy and paste plugin settings over channels
An automation or setting applied in one channel cannot be directly copied to another channel. However, one automation can control several parameters by making links.
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con No native Linux version
No native Linux version available. It's possible to run it using WINE with native performance. Instructions on how to set it up can be found here.
Con Native Mac is in beta
FL Studio for Mac is still in beta. It doesn't even yet support Yosemite or El Capitan.