Thinking about buying FL 6

[shamann]

and also thinking I shouldn't buy it. anyone want to help?

Try writing some music with the demo. You'll quickly know if it's for you or not. I've tried a demo of FL roughly every year since Fruity was first released in the way back. There is a lot to like about, and agree that IL seem like upstanding folk, but it is not for me. I try and I try, it's like some kind of pilgrimage for me, but it just isn't for me.

[Wormhelmet]

This sounds like a pain and the effects are built in to the synths I use. First with the hardware synths I owned and now with the software ones. Freeze makes it a one click job with the ability to unfreeze and tweak however you want. maybe that's why people like the feature. Not to maention if you decide to change envelope tweaks or filter tweaks three or four times till you are happy, doing it that way would involve 4 times the amount of time as messin with a frozen track. I imagine at some point FL will implement it. try a demo of Live or Sonar to see what freeze does and if it's better than bouncing. if you love FL, than by all means keep it. FL is constantly adding great features to it. As sson as they put a freeze in it and change the piano roll editing a bit, I will probably get it and use it in Live. FL works great with most hosts as a VST.

[TeeLangSun]

...Also, you can't see the notes of more than one pattern at a time which makes programming drums with seperated patterns a major PITA.

It's just funny, that most users don't seem to have any problems with that aspect. Could someone please explain, why?

Actually, you can indeed see them, but you can't edit them. You have to switch piano rolls in order to edit them. I do personally have a problem with that, but there's always the option of using a plugin drum machine or sampler which will show you all your drum parts in a single piano roll and make editing easy.

I think FL is king of the soft studios by far, but where it dabbles in some critical things for me, Cubase has taken these things farther than any other sequencer available. Still there are some cool things in FL that aren't in Cubase at all, like exporting individual tracks to separate wave files. That's simply awesome and the way FL set it up is also awesome and fast. FL also handles assigning knobs and faders on your keyboard vastly better than Cubase but FL is not as powerful where midi is concerned in general. With Cubase, half of the controls on my midi keyboard always control specific controls on many VSTi but this simply is not support in FL with the same VSTis. For example, on my midi keyboard, for a many VSTis, the same knob or fader always controls Volume, panning, reverb amount, pitch, some other synth programming aspects like a filter cutoff and maybe some aspects of ADSR. These things are always there for whichever instrument you select, but never in FL. There's the option of setting these things up, but when you go to the next instrument, you'd have to set them up on that instrument also, and as soon as you attempt to use a knob that's already in use by the last VSTi, you will have a conflict and be forced to undo the setup that you just did on the other VSTi, in order to connect the same controls on your midi keyboard to controls on the 2nd VSTi. And over and over.

[krumelur]

isnt this what the dashboard is for? never really sat down to figure this 'plugin' out. Any experts around?
Btw. freeze .. won't that shred your harddrive in terms of fragmenting it to pieces?

Is there an online version of this review from computer music?

[DavenH]

isnt this what the dashboard is for? never really sat down to figure this 'plugin' out.

It's a controller plugin, so you can link controllable parameters (almost all wheels/sliders can be linked to a controller in FL) to the wheels on the dashboard. Say if I have a layer, and I want to detune them, I can route all their pitches to a wheel on the dashboard, but modify the mapping formulae to make it so that it detunes the pitches when the wheel's value is changed.

There are many many uses for it.

[ceenda]

...Also, you can't see the notes of more than one pattern at a time which makes programming drums with seperated patterns a major PITA.

It's just funny, that most users don't seem to have any problems with that aspect. Could someone please explain, why?

TeeLangSun: Just to confirm, that's not my quote.