FL Studio Instruments question.

[Rabid]

Forgive my ignorance concerning FL Studio but I have not used it in years. Opened an email about Black Friday sales and thought it might be fun to load it up and play with FL again. Looked over the Black Friday Sales item and noticed an update to FL All Plugins edition for a good price. Then I noticed small writing at the bottom of one page, No VST versions. Checked out one of the instruments and at the bottom of the page it stated that it is FL Native and no VST version available.

Am I that out of touch not to have noticed that FL went totally native? (I could be.) The value of upgrading for me would be getting to use the plugins in Live and Bitwig. So, are all FL instruments now native and not VST?

[lin0x]

For a while, the Image-Line Synths have not been available in VST format. I think they took it off since it was hard to maintain the bugs or related to lacking mac support. I think you can still buy the VST versions from third-party stores like Plugin boutique.

However, one of the IL staff (Scott) confirmed back on May 22' that all plugins they used to sell are being updated and will return (no exact timeline so far). Existing customers (who already bought the VST versions) will get this update for free.

[Rabid]

Thanks for the info. I'm mostly a Mac user now, but I would like to get back to making loops in FL to load into my MPC.

[Blaster]

Beware that the FL All Plugins edition includes only the native plugins. If the vst versions are released again, you will not get them for free with this edition.

You can always load FL Studio as an instrument in another DAW and access the plugin this way.

[sjm]

This isn't the first time there has been a BF sale, so unless you want to go the FL Studio VSTi route (which will let you use everything, including things like 3xOsc in another host), you might want to wait and see how things develop.

This is pure speculation, but I suspect that they were discontinued as VSTs because of the effort it would have taken to both transition to VST3, and probably more imporantly, the cost of continually updating them to work on whatever architecture Apple has decided is flavour of the month this time. Someone probably looked at the bottom line, realised many of the plugins are getting long in the tooth and probably aren't the same money spinners that FL Studio itself is. The cost of maintenance probably meant that a decision was made that it just wasn't worth the limited resources.

However, since the announcement that they would be discontinued, FL have had a massive injection of VC, hired a bunch of new developers and generally changed their strategy (e.g. the copy protection is now online challenge/reponse rather than the old regkey). Shortly thereafter, we received word that the VSTs would be back, though I don't think there's an ETA yet. There are quite a lot of plugins that will need to be ported, so it's presumably going to take some time.

[Rabid]

... ... ... and probably more imporantly, the cost of continually updating them to work on whatever architecture Apple has decided is flavour of the month this time. ... ... ...

This is the thing that drives me crazy since moving totally to Apple. I was using a Waves package I bought 12 years ago on PC with no problems. Buy a new Apple computer and it comes with the latest OS ... suddenly I have to send waves a bunch of money for updates. I am grateful that the FL team is not blatantly greedy like Waves. I'll hold off and see what happens, and maybe just load it up on an old Windows laptop.