FL Studio over Reaper?

[shorty]

use FL Studio as a VST inside REAPER. done.

[liquidsound]

The thing about FL piano roll that has always puzzled me the most is that it really is not that special. Sure, there's a lot of features, but for the most part you can just poke with mouse, perhaps with ctrl/alt/shift modifiers to do the basics. Rather it's more like the piano rolls of most other DAWs were intentionally designed to be as inconvenient as possible. That's probably not the case, but I think what really makes FL's piano roll "special" is that someone clearly thought about usability, rather than just features.

I still prefer Ableton and MuLab simplicity and snappy pianoroll.

[musicproducerdee]

Why would you want to do that if Reaper is already working for you? Especially if you need to be convinced?

Anyways, I'll try to chime in on my experience with FL Studio.

- Step Sequencer is pretty neat for drums. Can add swing to your drums almost instantaneously
- The piano roll is one of the best I've ever worked with, and I use Cubase, so that's something
- It now has skins/themes available, so you can customize it to your liking, to a certain extent
- Multiple mixer views
- Lifetime free updates
- Very active community
- Unlimited tutorials
- Sketching ideas is very fast, so you can keep moving with the track and not get stuck in loops (although this is subjective)
- Depending on which version you have, stock plug-ins are very good, better than Reaper
- No half baked GUI, everything fits in place and looks like one program, and not half written GUI codes
- You have pretty much all the freedom you could desire in the arrangement window, can move things around without strictly staying in one track
- Can move around automation clips and can even create multiple automation clips for the same parameter and move them around like it's a pattern in the arrangement window
- If you make your own music videos or visualizers, ZGameEditor Visualizer is inbuilt into the DAW and is unbeatable by any other DAW. Period.

Oh hey, did I mention lifetime free updates? for a premium DAW that is widely used in the industry as well, and isn't just a hobbyist DAW? Yes, I did, but here I go again.

EDIT: I forgot Patcher. If you don't know what that is, look it up, it's pretty neat, especially if you like messing around with things and experimenting.

[mystran]

I think FL mixer is also pretty nice with it's compact display (in compact mode) and freeform routing. I keep forgetting that Patcher exists, because I'm just so used to doing whatever crazy modular routing directly in the mixer. Pretty much the only slightly inconvenient thing is dealing with effect plugins with multiple inputs/outputs (ie. have to select the channels in the properties page of the plugin window), but even that's not too bad.

[lotus2035]

One thing that I missed from Cubase switching to FL was having 3 separate mixers.
I used to have all my drums on one mixer and synths on another, audio on the third etc.

[frankpain]

add swing to your drums almost instantaneously

I love FL studio but trying to add swing quantization to notes in the piano roll is a pain in the
thats why im now using MPC software..I gots to have that swang

[stillshaded]

The thing about FL piano roll that has always puzzled me the most is that it really is not that special. Sure, there's a lot of features, but for the most part you can just poke with mouse, perhaps with ctrl/alt/shift modifiers to do the basics. Rather it's more like the piano rolls of most other DAWs were intentionally designed to be as inconvenient as possible. That's probably not the case, but I think what really makes FL's piano roll "special" is that someone clearly thought about usability, rather than just features.

Well said. They really do deserve credit for making it do simple stuff in an elegant way. And yes, it has always seemed kind of weird to me how inconvenient a lot of daws’ piano rolls are. My theory is that it’s relatively rare for people to be spending a lot of time wanking around in the piano roll the way I do, and it’s possible that a lot of devs just don’t really see a piano roll as needing to be so slick in its handling.

Another possible factor is that maybe it’s more difficult than you think to program a piano roll interface. Kind of reminds me of super Mario bros. The original game is so simple. Seems like there’s nothing to it. But then you look at the hundreds of rip offs, across many systems, and I’ll be damned if only a very few of them come close to having the same feel as smb1. Maybe there’s just some finesse here.

I do love the reaper piano roll now, but it still just doesn’t feel as good. I don’t know what it is. This may sound like it’s out of left field, but I feel like in FL studio, the area surrounding a note that responds to a click is larger, whereas in reaper I feel like I have click the exact pixel. Am I imagining things? Maybe little things like that though.

[Dionysos]

This may sound like it’s out of left field, but I feel like in FL studio, the area surrounding a note that responds to a click is larger, whereas in reaper I feel like I have click the exact pixel. Am I imagining things?

You're not, that's exactly it. And there are many more details like this that make the FL piano roll feel effortless to use and very tactile. Its former main developer had a background in video games and it shows.

[eluherlu]

This may sound like it’s out of left field, but I feel like in FL studio, the area surrounding a note that responds to a click is larger, whereas in reaper I feel like I have click the exact pixel. Am I imagining things? Maybe little things like that though.

That's exactly what I'm thinking of. It's easier to inserting notes in fl studio piano roll. Glad I'm not the only one who gets the feeling of this.

[eluherlu]

Why would you want to do that if Reaper is already working for you? Especially if you need to be convinced?

Anyways, I'll try to chime in on my experience with FL Studio.

- Step Sequencer is pretty neat for drums. Can add swing to your drums almost instantaneously
- The piano roll is one of the best I've ever worked with, and I use Cubase, so that's something
- It now has skins/themes available, so you can customize it to your liking, to a certain extent
- Multiple mixer views
- Lifetime free updates
- Very active community
- Unlimited tutorials
- Sketching ideas is very fast, so you can keep moving with the track and not get stuck in loops (although this is subjective)
- Depending on which version you have, stock plug-ins are very good, better than Reaper
- No half baked GUI, everything fits in place and looks like one program, and not half written GUI codes
- You have pretty much all the freedom you could desire in the arrangement window, can move things around without strictly staying in one track
- Can move around automation clips and can even create multiple automation clips for the same parameter and move them around like it's a pattern in the arrangement window
- If you make your own music videos or visualizers, ZGameEditor Visualizer is inbuilt into the DAW and is unbeatable by any other DAW. Period.

Oh hey, did I mention lifetime free updates? for a premium DAW that is widely used in the industry as well, and isn't just a hobbyist DAW? Yes, I did, but here I go again.

EDIT: I forgot Patcher. If you don't know what that is, look it up, it's pretty neat, especially if you like messing around with things and experimenting.

Thanks for the list. I'm still using Reaper. It's just I'm curious about FL studio, maybe I can get some musical advantage of its features.

[Niowiad]

You're missing Harmor. Not enough to make me switch DAWs but i do like it a lot.

Still possible

Although there are a couple issues in the VST version (and Sytrus has it a bit worse)...
Still, I'd say 99% functioning and MPE compatible.

Looks like resellers are getting out of licenses since IL stopped VST support.
I'm still seeing it on JRR Shop (not entirely sure it's the VST version, looks like it but might be worth asking)

[xbitz]

It is a wonderful piece of software to be used as a closed system to sketch ideas. You can use it like this first and see if it fits your needs.

over Reaper, Bitwig is able to read the .fls projects (it isn't so closed), they can be used together in pairs

https://www.bitwig.com/support/technica ... ts-flp-41/

[musicproducerdee]

Hey, are you the same xbitz by any chance, who created the Darkest Knight theme on FL Studio Forums?

[mystran]

Well said. They really do deserve credit for making it do simple stuff in an elegant way. And yes, it has always seemed kind of weird to me how inconvenient a lot of daws’ piano rolls are. My theory is that it’s relatively rare for people to be spending a lot of time wanking around in the piano roll the way I do, and it’s possible that a lot of devs just don’t really see a piano roll as needing to be so slick in its handling.

Another possible factor is that maybe it’s more difficult than you think to program a piano roll interface. Kind of reminds me of super Mario bros. The original game is so simple. Seems like there’s nothing to it. But then you look at the hundreds of rip offs, across many systems, and I’ll be damned if only a very few of them come close to having the same feel as smb1. Maybe there’s just some finesse here.

From the programming point of view it doesn't make a whole lot of difference what user action is used to trigger what operation, but the problem is that programming and HCI/UX are sort of different fields and you need someone who cares about both to be "wanking around in the piano roll" and tweaking the design until it feels right.

It is actually exactly the same thing with the feel of a game like a platfomer (or really any game). Most of the magic that makes a platformer feel good is not hard to implement, but it just takes a ton of iteration by someone who cares, because it's all about figuring out what feels good. There are some videos around on youtube about some of the "magic" that makes SMB in particular feel good and some of it really is not completely obvious... but it's not stuff that's hard to write in code.

[xbitz]

Hey, are you the same xbitz by any chance, who created the Darkest Knight theme on FL Studio Forums?

sry just have seen your comment, yepp



I still use it, what is the problem? luckily they fixed the visibility of the menus in 21.0.3