FL Studio 20.8.4 Released inc. Apple Silicon Support

[machinesworking]

Just read in this thread that Angus Hewlitt ended up as CTO of Image Line. Glad to hear that. Any chance of Image Line acquiring some of the abandoned FXPansion products?

Also, love how we have an Image Line rep here expressing opinions based on their professional first-hand experience with fanboys here sticking up for the platform and acting like they know more on the topic than the people actually doing it for a living. Where are Avid and Pace on native M1 support? How about Arturia and NI? How many months and months did porting their products cost U-he? And Image Line is getting dumped on for stating the obvious?

I'll be picking up one of the next round of MBPs for my very first Mac (first computer was an Apple II then PC since) so I'm excited about the M1 and beyond, but it's clear if you listen to cross-platform developers that Apple makes things very difficult for them in a way Windows does not.

The same reason you're actually going to buy a MBP is the same reason IL and others complain, these are not mutually exclusive but vastly interconnected issues. Apple deprecates old code that can't run Apple Silicon or is a threat to stability for the end user, and that's hard on developers who refuse to keep up or use cross platform code that cuts corners.

The reasons are clear why Apple does what it does, and a developer complaining about it is just playing into the long standing Apple hate that's pervaded this and other cross platform forums forever. It's not a fanboy thing to get tired of this, it's mentally draining to constantly read insinuations about how awful your choice of platform is. It insinuates that Microsoft is somehow how golden compared, and you get this constant drumbeat of trash tribal comments.

I feel like this whole thing is overblown though, in the end of the day Image Line beat Cubase, Live, and Pro Tools to Apple Silicon, if the implementation is solid then they can be partisan goobs all they want to, they delivered.

[Teksonik]

Windows 10 looks great to me, but recently my roommate who does almost nothing with her computer had a crippling bug, disk reading 100% full ins Task Manager when it's actually using only 15% of the drive, everything happening about 30x slower than it should. There was no solution to this, I spent days, went into the Windows shell, removed and did all kinds of fixes, dozens, suggested from Microsofts own forums, but in the end everything pointed to it being either an OS level bug or a dead HD. I installed a brand new SSD and Windows 10. Everything works perfectly, and in a deep test of the old drive there's nothing wrong.

That sounds exactly like the Windows 10 WaaSMedic Agent.exe issue that popped up starting earlier this year.

WaaS (which stands for Windows as a Service) runs as a scheduled task every Sunday or first boot thereafter and grinds away at your hard drive reading hundreds of thousands of files in the Win SxS and LCU Package for Rollup Fix folders and occasionally reading personal files.

Installing an SSD will solve the 100% disk issue but WaaS will still run. It can not be disabled from the Task Scheduler and even tuning it off with a Reg Hack will not work for long as Win 10 will simply turn it back on.

It even runs on a completely fresh fully updated install of Win10 21H1 with no other software installed. On my laptop with 21H1 and nothing else WaaS would run for up to 20 minutes making the system almost unusable. I finally had enough of Winblows 10 and replaced it with Kubuntu Linux and it's like having a brand new laptop. It's so much faster and responsive and Linux doesn't wear your drive out by constantly grinding away at it with a dozen different processes.

Several thousand users have reported they have the same issue with WaaS at the Microsoft "support" forums and I imagine there are many more affected and just haven't noticed. There has been no response from M$ despite several submissions to the Feedback Hub and the general consensus is that WaaS is simply designed to wear out older systems forcing people to buy SSDs or new systems altogether.

Sorry to go off topic but neither Microsoft or Apple get one bit of respect from me. They are simply necessary evils until Linux gains more developer support.

Since I'm on Windows for music production do I care if FL Studio supports Mac OS? No but supporting Macs has opened IL up to additional sales and that can only make the company more solid so all the time they have to spend keeping up with the Mac world of change is most likely worth it to all end users in the long run.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I feel like this whole thing is overblown though, in the end of the day Image Line beat Cubase, Live, and Pro Tools to Apple Silicon, if the implementation is solid then they can be partisan goobs all they want to, they delivered.

Can you at least recognize that continually supporting the latest and greatest from Apple is time and labor intensive and takes resources away from other things in a way that doesn't happen on the Windows side of the house? That's all that's being said.

No one's arguing it doesn't ultimately benefit their users when they've got things like crazy fast laptops that don't generate heat, but it's a pain the b@lls for developers to have to stop working on things they'd rather be doing to support Apple's regular breaking-things updates. Or when developers have to spend weeks and weeks to figure out why their Mac GUI performance went to sh*t because of some undocumented change. This stuff costs development time, which equals money. It prevents developers from working on new products or updates or other things they'd rather be doing. It ultimately costs non-Mac users who get no benefit from this, but are essentially paying for developers to constantly having to stop for weeks or months just to update code on the Mac. It costs us delayed and unreleased products as well.

So yeah, it may be the price of progress indeed, but it's a hefty price in the end. Time = money. Someone's paying for all of this and it's not Apple. It's the companies that need to support all this, which I'm sure in turn ultimately pass it along to consumers one way or the other.

I think it would be totally fair if developers began offering their products in 2 versions:

1. Windows only licenses (lowest cost option)
2. Mac+Windows licenses (higher cost to offset the constant development)

...because once it works on Windows, chances are it will for years and years. But with Mac, you'll be forced to rewrite code every other OS update.

[machinesworking]

Windows 10 looks great to me, but recently my roommate who does almost nothing with her computer had a crippling bug, disk reading 100% full ins Task Manager when it's actually using only 15% of the drive, everything happening about 30x slower than it should. There was no solution to this, I spent days, went into the Windows shell, removed and did all kinds of fixes, dozens, suggested from Microsofts own forums, but in the end everything pointed to it being either an OS level bug or a dead HD. I installed a brand new SSD and Windows 10. Everything works perfectly, and in a deep test of the old drive there's nothing wrong.

That sounds exactly like the Windows 10 WaaSMedic Agent.exe issue that popped up starting earlier this year.

WaaS (which stands for Windows as a Service) runs as a scheduled task every Sunday or first boot thereafter and grinds away at your hard drive reading hundreds of thousands of files in the Win SxS and LCU Package for Rollup Fix folders and occasionally reading personal files.

Installing an SSD will solve the 100% disk issue but WaaS will still run. It can not be disabled from the Task Scheduler and even tuning it off with a Reg Hack will not work for long as Win 10 will simply turn it back on.

It even runs on a completely fresh fully updated install of Win10 21H1 with no other software installed. On my laptop with 21H1 and nothing else WaaS would run for up to 20 minutes making the system almost unusable. I finally had enough of Winblows 10 and replaced it with Kubuntu Linux and it's like having a brand new laptop. It's so much faster and responsive and Linux doesn't wear your drive out by constantly grinding away at it with a dozen different processes.

Several thousand users have reported they have the same issue with WaaS at the Microsoft "support" forums and I imagine there are many more affected and just haven't noticed. There has been no response from M$ despite several submissions to the Feedback Hub and the general consensus is that WaaS is simply designed to wear out older systems forcing people to buy SSDs or new systems altogether.

Sorry to go off topic but neither Microsoft or Apple get one bit of respect from me. They are simply necessary evils until Linux gains more developer support.

Since I'm on Windows for music production do I care if FL Studio supports Mac OS? No but supporting Macs has opened IL up to additional sales and that can only make the company more solid so all the time they have to spend keeping up with the Mac world of change is most likely worth it to all end users in the long run.

Sounds like an OS bug MS aren't addressing which makes total sense, that it's an OS bug, not that they're not addressing it. Nothing solved the issue, and she never uses the laptop for anything besides Office and Zoom. What's weird is how randomly it hits people, but that's the luck of the draw I guess.

[aMUSEd]

So is Harmor working on Mac yet?

Yes. However we have stopped selling the VST version (all VST and AU plugins actually). Its all native only now.

That's annoying - don't want to have to buy FL Studio just to run a few plugins (I own Harmor, Harmless, Edison and several others as well). Unless there was a really cheap pathway for us plugin orphans to get it.

Why can't IL make a lite version of FL available just for the purpose of loading their plugins since there is now no way to load the plugins I have bought in anything else? It could be something like the old IL Chainer device that used to be available free as a modular subhost. That could even be their only VST/AU plugin and everything else could just be loaded via that, like a wrapper.

At the moment I now have close to a dozen IL plugins I bought that I can no longer use and I can't even sell them to someone else so I would appreciate a way to still use them.

[machinesworking]

I feel like this whole thing is overblown though, in the end of the day Image Line beat Cubase, Live, and Pro Tools to Apple Silicon, if the implementation is solid then they can be partisan goobs all they want to, they delivered.

Can you at least recognize that continually supporting the latest and greatest from Apple is time and labor intensive and takes resources away from other things in a way that doesn't happen on the Windows side of the house? That's all that's being said.

No one's arguing it doesn't ultimately benefit their users when they've got things like crazy fast laptops that don't generate heat, but it's a pain the b@lls for developers to have to stop working on things they'd rather be doing to support Apple's regular breaking-things updates. Or when developers have to spend weeks and weeks to figure out why their Mac GUI performance went to sh*t because of some undocumented change. This stuff costs development time, which equals money. It prevents developers from working on new products or updates or other things they'd rather be doing. It ultimately costs non-Mac users who get no benefit from this, but are essentially paying for developers to constantly having to stop for weeks or months just to update code on the Mac. It costs us delayed and unreleased products as well.

So yeah, it may be the price of progress indeed, but it's a hefty price in the end. Time = money. Someone's paying for all of this and it's not Apple. It's the companies that need to support all this, which I'm sure in turn ultimately pass it along to consumers one way or the other.

I think it would be totally fair if developers began offering their products in 2 versions:

1. Windows only licenses (lowest cost option)
2. Mac+Windows licenses (higher cost to offset the constant development)

...because once it works on Windows, chances are it will for years and years. But with Mac, you'll be forced to rewrite code every other OS update.

IMO Windows is at this point a testimony to what happens when a company can't afford to cut out the dead weed. We all know this is coming, at some point MS will have to buckle up and get rid of decades of legacy code. They already have an Arm version of Windows out, but they went their traditional route and used third party chips. They're going to be designing their own chips soon. It will be a nightmare for them, because of the same reasons that Apple gets hammered constantly for deprecating old code and making developers jump through hoops. Nobody is currently developing software for their Arm OS, but at some point MS is going to have to force their hands, because thermals say that for most of the industry Arm with a SOC design is the future.

Basically Apple get shit for being first in line, they always have, people were screaming when they removed the serial port, CD, floppy, Flash, etc. etc. etc.

Oh and BTW this is how f*cked up capitalism is, OS9, being far far behind Windows in sales was the last time I saw price differences between the mac and pc versions of software. Basically low sales meant that developers saw no issue with charging more, but now than Apple is I would bet easily 50% of the sales of audio software, you're not going to see this, it would cost developers sales, especially DAW developers, why would anyone pay an inflated price for Cubase etc. when Logic updates have been free for ten years?

[FapFilter]

Yeah, right
MS never ever has been shat on!

The difference that justifies it, is simply because all MS does is amateur BS and abusing of their monopoly, while Apple is the conductor of the gifts from the gods to mankind

[T-CM11]

They're going to be designing their own chips soon.

Source?

ARM might be a great thing for laptops, but x86 still provides the best (absolute) performance. And many people/businesses care a lot about backwards compatibility.

[Image-Line]

Can you at least recognize that continually supporting the latest and greatest from Apple is time and labor intensive and takes resources away from other things in a way that doesn't happen on the Windows side of the house? That's all that's being said.

That is a fair summary. And there's another sting in the tail. Apple is a direct competitor to us and indeed all DAW developers, with Logic.

Speaking of which. No-one benefits when people defend corporations. They are not people or your friends - no matter how warm and friendly your iPhone or M1 macbook feels, and no good comes of it when you do.

And yes Image-Line is a corporation too.

[machinesworking]

Yeah, right
MS never ever has been shat on!

The difference that justifies it, is simply because all MS does is amateur BS and abusing of their monopoly, while Apple is the conductor of the gifts from the gods to mankind

Don't strawman this please. Microsoft gets attacked all the time, just not on KVR over random things.
This goes back before Apple was a big deal in the early 2000's when they struggled, since I've been coming here there have been customers and developers taking shots at Apple saying people should use Windows etc. It's a frequency issue, not a black and white issue.

[machinesworking]

Can you at least recognize that continually supporting the latest and greatest from Apple is time and labor intensive and takes resources away from other things in a way that doesn't happen on the Windows side of the house? That's all that's being said.

That is a fair summary. And there's another sting in the tail. Apple is a direct competitor to us and indeed all DAW developers, with Logic.

Truth for sure there.
You have to admit though it's a weird flex to mention Logic as a threat when Apple owned Logic years before Delphi had a Mac port. Obviously the execs at FL thought they would do fine.

Speaking of which. No-one benefits when people defend corporations. They are not people or your friends - no matter how warm and friendly your iPhone or M1 macbook feels, and no good comes of it when you do.

And yes Image-Line is a corporation too.

You're de facto the face of Image Line what with your name. You attacking another corporation is going to make for discussion, because whether we like it or not people are invested in a set of tools to do their job, and if the tools are attacked people defend their reasons for using those tools. Do you think good comes from you as a corporate rep attacks another corporation on an open forum?

IMO it's different for you, you're directly invested in Image Line, but for me it's pretty straightforward. I was looking at picking up a new laptop, mines near ten years old. The M1 gets announced, and all of a sudden I'm thinking I don't have to choose either low power CPU's or heat blasting windmills. I'm a fan of Windows touch screens so I seriously looked into that, but the only options are these windmills heaters or laptops nearly as bad CPU wise as my 2012.

So I'm a fan of tech moving forward, I'm a huge fan of the fact that for me personally it's 99% likely that the next gen M1x or whatever they call it will be quiet, cool, and more powerful than I need. Does it bother me that Apple makes some blunt, unfair moves? sure, not a fan. I also think iOS recently is a dumpster fire. The M1? Absolutely the opposite, I understand that it's hard on developers, and I don't care. My main job is 100% harder than yours and doesn't pay as well I'm willing to bet. I've got the scar tissue to prove it.

I want to be excited that you released the M1 version, I want to think about picking it up and learning it when I get an Apple Silicon Mac, that's what I want, to be happy that you guys did the work, and that finally we're seeing movement in the mobile market, because literally before this it's just been about managing thermals in 8 core laptops with no battery life and 50+ DB noise levels.

Anyway I am really glad you guys are moving forward, that the port is out. I just wish it wasn't always a Debbie Downer experience from certain developers when they talked about the dammed OS I use... I literally never really think about it outside of KVR, and I do have lifelong friends that worked at Apple for 20+ years etc. Same with Microsoft. Random nonsense if you read this far, my friend gave me a 100% dead G5 test machine he had laying around, I'm gonna gut it and slap an AMD mb into it, then paste the latest Windows Logo on the side, should look pretty good actually.

[apoclypse]

Can you at least recognize that continually supporting the latest and greatest from Apple is time and labor intensive and takes resources away from other things in a way that doesn't happen on the Windows side of the house? That's all that's being said.

That is a fair summary. And there's another sting in the tail. Apple is a direct competitor to us and indeed all DAW developers, with Logic.

Speaking of which. No-one benefits when people defend corporations. They are not people or your friends - no matter how warm and friendly your iPhone or M1 macbook feels, and no good comes of it when you do.

And yes Image-Line is a corporation too.

That's a weird thing to bring up. Has Apple done anything to you as a developerto show you that Logic is getting preferential treatment on their platform? The macOS platform seems to have a thriving and vibrant DAW market so I'm not sure how relevant it is that Apple competes in the same market. Most of other DAWs already have M1 support so it seems that will continue for the foreseeable future.

[Image-Line]

That's a weird thing to bring up.

Why? They compete with all DAW developers. That is a weird situation.

Has Apple done anything to you as a developerto show you that Logic is getting preferential treatment on their platform?

Of course, Garage Band, the gateway drug to Logic, is free across macOS and iOS devices.

https://www.apple.com/au/mac/garageband/

This is far from a level playing field.

Now, in full disclosure DAWs also occupy a similar situation with 3rd party plugin developers. Every time they (we) release an included plugin in a certain category it can eat into their sales.

These are just facts about the industry.

[machinesworking]

That's a weird thing to bring up. Has Apple done anything to you as a developerto show you that Logic is getting preferential treatment on their platform? The macOS platform seems to have a thriving and vibrant DAW market so I'm not sure how relevant it is that Apple competes in the same market. Most of other DAWs already have M1 support so it seems that will continue for the foreseeable future.

Well it's been years but when Apple bought Logic they had previously announced that they were developing Audio Units. When the dev kits were distributed MOTU in particular had decided to go all in on AU in OS X. So they did all they could to match perfectly AU spec in their DAW Digital Performer.
AU was a crash festival with DP, just a mess. It turned out Apple had tweaked AU spec specifically to compensate for some of Logic's weird peculiarities. So MOTU had done all this work just to have Apple admit they tweaked the code.

Another not even conspiracy theory thing is pretty dammed straightforward. The Logic team in right there in Cupertino, before any other DAW developer even knew about Apple Silicon (besides maybe reading between the lines with all the new requirements in Big Sure, Catalina, and the industry gossip), Logic was Apple Silicon ready the day the computers hit the shelves. The Logic team has direct access to any other department at Apple if theres a conflict or reason to use a resource. It's extremely advantageous to have access to the hardware, and OS before it's even released.

[Teksonik]

Sounds like an OS bug MS aren't addressing which makes total sense, that it's an OS bug, not that they're not addressing it. Nothing solved the issue, and she never uses the laptop for anything besides Office and Zoom. What's weird is how randomly it hits people, but that's the luck of the draw I guess.

Sunday is "WaaS Day" (you can check in the Task Scheduler/Microsoft/Windows/WaaS) so the reports start rolling in. Two from this morning:

"I finally found a fix ... actually a work around ... for this issue. I replaced my HD with a SSD. Now, instead of waiting 5-15 minutes for my laptop to boot, it's fully up and running in 8-15 SECONDS."

"I discovered that the WaaSMedicAgent.exe was busy reading files in the C:\Windows\servicing\LCU folder, so I navigated to it using explorer. The folder contains 3 subfolders:
C:\Windows\servicing\LCU\Package_for_RollupFix~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~19041.1110.1.15 dated 7/17/2021
C:\Windows\servicing\LCU\Package_for_RollupFix~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~19041.1165.1.8 dated 8/25/2021
C:\Windows\servicing\LCU\Package_for_RollupFix~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~19041.1202.1.15 dated 9/3/2021

"If you're not aware, these folders contain files used by Windows Update to patch various services in literally every OS version for the listed cpu architecture. The 3 folders collectively contain 255,153 files in 80,059 subfolders totalling 3.09 gb of data.
(My Edit: That doesn't count all the files WaaS reads in the Win SxS folder)
According to procmon, WaaSMedicAgent was reading every single one of these 255,000 files and checking each one to see if it was needed. Here's the kicker though, each of those folders is from a PREVIOUSLY INSTALLED WINDOWS UPDATE! That means WaaS is checking OLD patches to see if they need to be patched AGAIN!" End quotes.

So it's quite apparent that M$ is intentionally trying to force people to upgrade to SSDs so that even systems that shipped with Win 10 and HDDs are affected with the WaaS Medic issue.

Sure we should all be running SSDs in 2021 but not everybody can afford to upgrade. I have 7 systems that still have spinning hard drives so it's no trivial expense for me.

Once again not trying to hijack the thread but my point is Microsoft deserves just as much hatred as Apple.

With Win 11 not be able to run on millions and millions of perfectly capable machines and Win 10 support slated to end in 2025 there will decisions to be made. Use an unsupported OS, pay to upgrade your hardware, or move to Mac OS or Linux.

But at least with the Windows fiasco it's not really the end user's fault other than choosing Win 10 in the first place.

For those Mac users who have made the conscious decision to jump on the Silicon bandwagon and are now complaining to developers about support well that's why they call early adoption the "bleeding edge" of technology. There will be pain.

Anyway back on the topic of FL Studio 20.8.4 it's another great free update to a great DAW. Looking forward to version 21 as well.