FL Studio 21.1 released! - A disappointment in the making

[Trancit]

Gol was a video game designer and it shows in his work. His complete lack of understanding of all things MIDI...

That what made using FL to make music fun in the first place wasn't it? He understood pretty well what MIDI was but also that it was decades old and chose to not follow it.

Music notation is many centuries old and we still use it because it works

MIDI has been the accepted protocol since 1981.... because it works. So much so that we're now on MIDI 2.0: "MIDI 2.0 is an extension of MIDI 1.0. It does not replace MIDI 1.0 but builds on the core principles, architecture, and semantics of MIDI 1.0".

Just because some guy who had done nothing but a pornographic video game didn't understand that fact is not a positive thing for FL Studio.

Making music is already fun but using a poorly designed DAW is not......

I know we had already a discussion before but again:

You might be tricked by your memory... Midi never worked very well... there was always lots of Jitter, timing issues, to rough resolution, Midi devices were still a big joke... Midi was actually always the greatest BS ever invented...
The only reason it got never changed was due to the fact that it would have been most likely impossible to get all the different developers under one roof again...
As it was invented there was absolutely no alternative (besides perhaps control voltage)
Afterwards the developer community would have been compeltely divided and instead of having one standard, there might have been 10 standards today...
So even if they knew it was the worst idea they ever had, they never touched it again...
There is talk about Midi 2.0 since at least 15 if not 20 years and it didn´t happen until now and the discussion will probably go on another 20 years without seeing bigger improvements...

MPE is just an addition to Midi and again there wasn´t any alternative so we have seen that it saw the light of day but in what pace... until know perhaps 10% of all developers have adapted it...

Midi 2.0 will eventually be forever a wet dream for all people being sick about the Midi standard in general.

Especially at this time (FLS must have been in the make from at least 1996 onwards) all available DAWs even if they have all started as pure Midi Sequencers didn´t work very well with midi and had such a bad timing that nobody would ever like to use something like this again...

For a newly created DAW like FLS it was just comon sense trying to improve on that topic and especially here one have to keep in mind that most likely FLS was not created with having in mind it would evolve one day to the center piece of a bigger Studio, so Gol went the safest way he could do:
F*ck Midi... I do my own thing...

You are always wiser afterwards!

It´s easy to tell now as we know the outcome that it wasn´t the most futureproof decision and yes for stuff like copying CC data from one instrument to another it´s really an issue... but this is actually a tiny thing compared to the goodies people could enjoy in the first decade of FLS compared to what others offered until the DAW developers manipulated the handling of the midi implementation in their own DAWs to compensate for the awkward Midi problems, which Midi actually ever had...

In the first decade FLS always blew all other DAWs out of the water in regards of tight timing for "Midi" and Automation ... it offered such a precise timing that many many people took it over immediately for all their drum sequencing instead of their actual DAW...

So Gol was absolutely aware what he does... perhaps he wasn´t 100% aware of the shortcomings this will lead to one day but I am very sure even if... it wouldn´t have changed his mind... he never wanted to open up FLS that way we see nowadays... he always saw it more as a closed system like Reason was at this time (or shortly after and onwards for many years...)

So no... Midi was never a good alternative and was actually always complete sh*tty...

[sjm]

What gol didn't understand - and I think this is at the crux of what Teksonic is saying - is why making your DAW MIDI compatible/compliant is necessary. Yes, I'm sure he read the specs, I'm sure he thought the specs could be improved, but he didn't for one second stop and consider the implications of just not bothering to make FL Studio MIDI compliant.

That's the lack of understanding on gol's part. The inability to grasp that the entire music-making ecosystem is built around MIDI as the solution for interoperability and communication between devices. Understanding something is more than just reading a spec, it's also about grasping the implications that come with making your design choices. And there's no way anyone can reasonably argue that he understood that. For a start, he was never a musician. He'd never used a MIDI device. He didn't understand why there are CCs that cover certain standard functions, and why VSTs respond to those automatically - he wasn't even really aware that these existed until I pointed it out to him many years ago.

Yes, you can work around some (but by no means all) of the limitations of his botched implementation. But the whole point of MIDI was that you plug it in and it works without needing to faff around as a user. If I plug in a sustain pedal, I expect it to work with any gear that supports the pedal; if I have an e-drum kit that sends CC4 when moving the hihat pedal, I expect that to work with my VSTs. That's what the spec calls for. I don't expect to have to implement it myself in the software as a user. The way he "implemented MIDI" - which is really not what he did - was to make FL Studio swallow all CCs and then put the burden on the user to set up their gear to work with their VSTs. Each individual user ends up having to fix the problem separately, when the obvious solution is to just make it work. This is software design 101. Not understanding that was not understanding MIDI, nor understanding software development.

For context:
In Reaper: You load up the plugin and use the sustain pedal.
In FL Studio: You load up the plugin. You disable the bizarre sustain pedal settings in the MIDI settings. You open up browse parameters for the target plugin. You browse for 3 minutes through a list of thousands of parameters until you get to the MIDI CCs at the end. You right click on CC 64 (Sustain). You map that to CC 64 (sustain). You are now ready to use the pedal with the plugin in the current session only.

The fact that I have needed to provide tech support for a vast number of people - both officially and inofficially - in order for them to be able to use their expensive hardware with FL Studio also illustrates how absolutely unintuitive this is. It's poor design, and it's not understanding the problem domain (which goes waaaaaay beyond reading a spec). These are absolutely red flags for software development, and in a properly run business with competent professionals, should be rare occurrences. There's a real cultural issue here, unfortunately. Even today, the IL team do not even understand the problem, so a fix is a long way off.

Yes, I appreciate that gol left the current devs with a garbled implementation that isn't easy to fix. But forwarding CCs to the currently selected VST should not actually be beyond the realms of possibility. Instead of swallowing the unmapped CCs, all you need is a single line of code that forwards the CC to the currently selected VST. That's it. It's not rocket surgery. But that will never happen until IL stop pretending that everything is fine. The first step to fixing an issue is recognising that the issue exists. 20 years on, and IL still haven't grasped what the problem is. If only they got themselves some MIDI gear and tried it out, it would be apparent in seconds.

[Teksonik]

I know we had already a discussion before

Yes we've already had this conversation so you're wasting your breath. Your argument is no more cogent now than it was before.

You might be tricked by your memory... Midi never worked very well... there was always lots of Jitter, timing issues, to rough resolution, Midi devices were still a big joke... Midi was actually always the greatest BS ever invented.

Utter and complete nonsense. It has nothing to do with memory. I use MIDI every single day and have used it since the 80's. Is MIDI perfect ? No, but none of the 6 other DAWs I own and use have the issues and problems with MIDI that FL Studio does. None...of...them. Why? Because they weren't programmed by a porno video game guy they were programmed by people who understand music and MIDI's role in it's evolution. I was there for the MIDI revolution and it was as much of a game changer as VST technology has been over the last two decades.

this is actually a tiny thing compared to the goodies people could enjoy

Tiny thing for you but it's so important to me I've started using other DAWs. I don't want "goodies", I want tools that work. As my keyboard playing continues to evolve it's become apparent that FL is simply not the right tool and don't even get me started on how it handles PPQN.

So no... Midi was never a good alternative and was actually always complete sh*tty...

Again utter and complete nonsense. MIDI is so "sh*tty" that every other DAW on the market handles it just fine and it's been around and accepted for over 40 years. Countless composers have used MIDI to create top albums and movie scores etc over the years.

I know you're just in defense of DAW mode or in this case defense of Gol mode but there is no doubt in my mind that FL Studio and Image-Line are far far better off without him. It succeeded not because of Gol but in spite of him and his myopic vision. Remember he was getting pretty confrontational with the user base and I wouldn't be surprised if IL didn't "invite" him to leave rather than it being his decision. I hope he never comes back. Yes in 2003 Fruity Loops might have been near the top of DAWs but it's 2023.

I still use FL Studio and have since version 3 but I've been working with other DAWs recently because of the poor way FL handles MIDI and they are a breath of fresh air. I've simply grown tired of FL's limitations for the way I work.

Let me go over it one more time. If I record a lead line on my guitar and bend a note, that bend is part of the performance. Without the bend the performance does not sound the same.

It's no different when I bend a note or apply AT to a note. That data belongs to that note. Remove the data and the performance is ruined. After years of bringing the issue up I finally got someone who now writes the code for FL to understand that fact but judging by his response a fix is not in the near future if ever and I think that's due in large part to Gol programming them into a corner.

So the choices for me are keep putting up with the limitations of FL or move on. I am now favoring the latter and not the former.

[Teksonik]

What gol didn't understand - and I think this is at the crux of what Teksonic is saying - is why making your DAW MIDI compatible/compliant is necessary.

Well said, your whole post.

[Schnickschnack]

So 21.2 will have FL Cloud, stem seperation and a new synth:
Kepler

[Schnickschnack]

I already have Tal U-No-LX but stem seperation is huge for me and FL cloud could be handy for some little things.

[N__K]

Some things in gol's defense:

1. gol had programmed a tracker before FL, not only games (check 's videos on Youtube)
2. FL was designed as a virtual drum machine, then expanded into a virtual studio, then into a DAW-like app - the latter, apparently, largely due to mishmash requests by users (of which I was/am one)
3. then gol programmed Sytrus
4. then gol programmed Maximus
5. then gol programmed Harmor
6. ...and other fun and useful tools, which work well for what they were designed to do.

The point being, gol seems to have/had a peculiar spark of personally motivated innovation, one that is still more often associated with artists in fields of music etc. than those who write code. As an avid user of Harmor, I see in it some quirkiness that could be explained by designer/programmer having treated the project as a work of art - that is, more than a mere job. And at least in case of Harmor, the result of gol's approach is a tool that is still, in its own right, unmatched. It's almost its own paradigm, and while not perfect, it got a lot of things about additive synthesis right - better than any other attempt to date.

Some of the same could be said about FL Studio. Apparently, in part due to gol originally designing it as a hardware-less tool - only a PC was required - it found huge popularity among people who were looking for just such a thing. That nowadays many of us expect FL Studio to be so much more is a lot to ask of a project with such roots.

Personally, I have given to IL (and gol, back in the day) plenty of unsolicited suggestions to the effect of rewriting, forking and/or extending FL Studio into more of a traditional sequencer/DAW. I vaguely recall gol once replying with something to the effect of "just use other tools which do what you want". That was good advice I'm happy to pass on

[Trancit]

I know we had already a discussion before

Yes we've already had this conversation so you're wasting your breath. Your argument is no more cogent now than it was before.

It is valid as it was before... you just refuse to understand!

You might be tricked by your memory... Midi never worked very well... there was always lots of Jitter, timing issues, to rough resolution, Midi devices were still a big joke... Midi was actually always the greatest BS ever invented.

Utter and complete nonsense. It has nothing to do with memory. I use MIDI every single day and have used it since the 80's. Is MIDI perfect ? No, but none of the 6 other DAWs I own and use have the issues and problems with MIDI that FL Studio does. None...of...them. Why? Because they weren't programmed by a porno video game guy they were programmed by people who understand music and MIDI's role in it's evolution. I was there for the MIDI revolution and it was as much of a game changer as VST technology has been over the last two decades.

Stop talking and begin thinking... you talk about the "now" state... I am refering to how things were in the past as Gol made his decisions!
You want to tell me that Cubase and others had a solid and accurate Midi timing in 1996???
Huge laughter!!
This was so wonky that you had timing fluctuations up to a 32nd note in there... not to speak that the whole thing was sometimes stuttering that you had to record everything to audio and hope to get a snippet inside which had a good timing...
I couldn´t count the endless tries to get a DAT recording done where over the desired length the timing was good enough...
Perhaps you were not able to hear it... many others were... this was one of the factors of the huge success of FLS ...it´s rock solid timing while other DAWs where more comparable to a random timing generator!
Midi and solid timing in the past were things which have never appeared in the same sentence in the 90´s other than talking about the lack of it...
Same goes for the steppy resolution of midi CC´s... it was impossible to have a smooth filter sweep with Midi CC´s... just later hacks in both Instruments and Daws have made it possible...
In FL Studio since day one... no problem at all!

this is actually a tiny thing compared to the goodies people could enjoy

Tiny thing for you but it's so important to me I've started using other DAWs. I don't want "goodies", I want tools that work. As my keyboard playing continues to evolve it's become apparent that FL is simply not the right tool and don't even get me started on how it handles PPQN.

It´s a thing now... but never forget that Gol for sure had never in mind that FLS evolves the way we see it now!

So no... Midi was never a good alternative and was actually always complete sh*tty...

Again utter and complete nonsense. MIDI is so "sh*tty" that every other DAW on the market handles it just fine and it's been around and accepted for over 40 years. Countless composers have used MIDI to create top albums and movie scores etc over the years.

Accepted since 40 years is a good joke...
What alternative do you have if there is no other choice??
Yes of course they have created a lot of stuff but I am very sure they could have released it in shorter time if they wouldn´t have had to fight with the shortcomings of Midi all the time...

What is nowadays a matter of seconds hase taken hours over hours in the 90´s...

Fact is the problems were definetely there no matter how much you deny it...
I remember very well how much I fought in this times and that is what I´ve said... you might be tricked by your memory if you think you wouldn´t have had that problems at this time!

[sjm]

What alternative do you have if there is no other choice??

A question that gol should have probably taken the time to ask himself. You have (inadventently) hit the nail right on the head here. There is no alternative, so not implementing MIDI support wasn't an option. But gol chose that option anyway. That's the problem in a nutshell.

[Trancit]

What alternative do you have if there is no other choice??

A question that gol should have probably taken the time to ask himself. You have (inadventently) hit the nail right on the head here. There is no alternative, so not implementing MIDI support wasn't an option. But gol chose that option anyway. That's the problem in a nutshell.

I am for sure no fan of Gol... he behaved more than once like a stubborn idiot...
But his decision for the vision he had in mind for FLS was absolutely correct...

Midi wasn´t an alternative... he wanted to create something without the issues the others had to face...
Converting the problematic Midi to his own system was the only way to go at this time...
Does it have shortcomings if you leave his actual intended path... sure... the system wasn´t created for such kind of work... perhaps the nowadays devs are able to fix it...some day...
But at the very end the guys who are into intense Midi and CC features, you are trying to fit a square pig through a round hole atm...
It is not Gol´s fault... he did what he had to do... FLS isn´t capable (and will probably not be for long time) to provide such functionality and I don´t think it´s on even middle priority not speak high...
So the question is more, if people who are badly needing such functionality have chosen the right product for their work.
I doubt the majority of FLS users have even noticed the issues you are running into every day as they don´t use any special Midi features and are happy with how Gol has setup this system...
As long as their keyboard triggers their instruments everything is fine...

On top of that everybody has to remember that FLS users were able already for a very long time to do polyphonic modulation (on native instruments) where everybody claims nowadays it would be the greatest thing on earth...
This was already available since 20 years just in FLS because Gol created his own system and gave a shit on stoneage Midi... just one goodie besides the lightyears ahead accurate timing and Automation precision others could only dream of at this time...

Compared to the actual benefits Gol created with his decision, I am sorry but against that, your problems are laughable (I know, this will be the point you´ll try to blame me... ) and if you cannot live without, I fear you are using the wrong product...
As everybody was telling me the same when I tried to fight against the pattern system...the same is true for everybody relying on exchangeability of Midi CC between instruments...

[sjm]

I don't think "using a sustain pedal" or "using a VST-specific template for a simple controller" falls under intense MIDI work. I can only assume your own experience here is very limited. If you have hardware, it uses MIDI. Yes, N_K was right in the earlier post in this thread that the focus in the early days was very much on "making music ITB", but the minute that decision was made to include support for MIDI hardware, was the moment that it would have made sense to actually add that functionality. To argue anything else is nonsensical at best and ignorant at worst (the latter being where gol falls).

[xbitz]

Bitwig developers initially wanted to create their own implementation of MIDI channels, but it was rolled back (during the beta phase? by the pressure of the negative feedback), and then it was replaced with the official MIDI channel implementation. I'm not sure where their initial idea came from

[Trancit]

Nevermind...

[xbitz]

Képernyőfotó 2023-09-15 - 22.24.31.png

https://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic. ... 0#p1883209

btw. have you seen the new playlist editor no end of fun on here

[osiris]

Kepler? What's this gorgeousness?