FL Studio 21.2 What is your favorite thing?

[Bartone]

FL Studio 21.2 is out.
I find the Extract stems from sample function quite interesting.
I think it will be handy when trying to find how some bass lines are played etc. Good for learning.

What are your favorites in this FL Studio version update?

[MirkoVanHauten]

Not that many things in that are relevant to me, yet a good update. New synth & stem extraction seems nice. Automatic mastering is something that already fails on all other platforms so I don't expect it to replace a mastering engineer here either, but it sure will be useful for beginners & hobbyists.

I dislike the general trend in music production of going back to Dance eJay times where we'd just put premade loops in an arrangement It's just logical FL picked up on this and implemented their own splice version then.

[Caine123]

i think this will attract of people but man, im still waiting for so long overdue basic stuff..............

[MrJubbly]

I'm glad Image-Line have finally got the Cloud stuff released, that they obviously have wanted to for a while. I remember them hinting at some of the online stuff way back last year, before the release of 21.0, when they decided they'd have to postpone it to get v21 officially released in 2022.

The main reason I'm glad though, is that now this is out of the way, they should hopefully be able to turn their attention back to core DAW improvements. I've read they are working on a new mixer and playlist features, because they have been requested by so many users.

Personally, my first priority would be to improve the window management of the DAW, so that the various panels and editors are better and more efficiently controlled and not opening randomly over the screen.

And core elements, like the playlist and mixer not continually shifting and re-sizing of their own accord. Less clicking to perform basic functions and customized key binding is also needed and would be much appreciated to improve the DAW's workflow.

Image-Line have done a lot of good things and they are definitely improving the DAW overall. So I believe they'll get to these issues ... eventually.

[jules99]

Man oh man, Imagine-Line releases a point update that includes a new synth, online mastering and automated upload to Spotify through Distrokid, FL Cloud (which at $7.99 a month for loops, mastering and DSP upload is a pretty nice deal), stem separation and they even bring audio clips into Fruity Edition. And still users complain.

I'm an Ableton head and will never switch. But this is one of the most impressive DAW updates I've seen in years. And it's a point update.

[Dionysos]

The main reason I'm glad though, is that now this is out of the way, they should hopefully be able to turn their attention back to core DAW improvements.

It's a different team working on FL Cloud.

[FarleyCZ]

Honestly? I'm gonna be the black sheep on this one. I don't like the trend this is setting up. You're gonna have kids who think all music production is is downloading bunch of looops, remixing them into a track, putting AI master on top of it and sending it straight for distribution. All in the one program.

We all had the pleasure to be told we suck before embarassig ourselves on Spotify. All the new FL kids will grind hard to make more and more and more of these loop-remixes. Spotify won't be able to keep up, so they de-monetize quite a chunk of their user base (they already introduced that idea lately). You're gonna end up with even more depressed kids that sunk the best years of their lifes into a dream they've been promised, but was never possible from the start. And they paid Image Line and Distrokid, and Spotify quite a chunk of money on the way.

Spotify will also have to react by editting their algorithms, so your average Joe (who pays most of their bills) will find the one Taylor Swift he's looking for and not thousands of "Taylore Swiftie 245" kids. That will make it harder for every small creator to get discovered, because the gist of their algorithm works on cluster analysis and by recommending you other stuff people from your cluster like. Chances for you as an independent artist to get to those cluster will be thining in much higher rate than it has been up until now. Every honest small musician will be burried under all the kids who just downloaded FL and "tried their luck". Imo Spotify right now has no way to differenciate between the two. The technical and financial barrier was the differenciator. But with this service, it's gone.

Dunno. Mixed feelings on this.

[Frankie.T]

Honestly? I'm gonna be the black sheep on this one. I don't like the trend this is setting up. You're gonna have kids who think all music production is is downloading bunch of looops, remixing them into a track, putting AI master on top of it and sending it straight for distribution. All in the one program.

We all had the pleasure to be told we suck before embarassig ourselves on Spotify. All the new FL kids will grind hard to make more and more and more of these loop-remixes. Spotify won't be able to keep up, so they de-monetize quite a chunk of their user base (they already introduced that idea lately). You're gonna end up with even more depressed kids that sunk the best years of their lifes into a dream they've been promised, but was never possible from the start. And they paid Image Line and Distrokid, and Spotify quite a chunk of money on the way.

Spotify will also have to react by editting their algorithms, so your average Joe (who pays most of their bills) will find the one Taylor Swift he's looking for and not thousands of "Taylore Swiftie 245" kids. That will make it harder for every small creator to get discovered, because the gist of their algorithm works on cluster analysis and by recommending you other stuff people from your cluster like. Chances for you as an independent artist to get to those cluster will be thining in much higher rate than it has been up until now. Every honest small musician will be burried under all the kids who just downloaded FL and "tried their luck". Imo Spotify right now has no way to differenciate between the two. The technical and financial barrier was the differenciator. But with this service, it's gone.

Dunno. Mixed feelings on this.

100% agree with you

[bmanic]

Hmm.. I have the feeling that the aesthetics of "sucking/being bad at creating music" will simply shift. Sure, everybody can just drag and drop loops and create a song, but HOW you match them up, what you do to them, which ones you choose, are all skills and just like before and to the end of time, it will separate the actually talented people from the not so talented. It's a different skills set but it will be no less valid than us working with DAWs where you can plop down notes with a mouse.

You can always have a similar argument that it was "more difficult before" and hence more impressive. That hasn't changed. It's the same argument made when new technology emerges.

However, once AI starts doing completely new music and does it better than any of us do.. meaning they win the popularity contest, then we are in trouble.

[Trensharo]

I don't like the trend this is setting up. You're gonna have kids who think all music production is is downloading bunch of looops, remixing them into a track, putting AI master on top of it and sending it straight for distribution. All in the one program.

There are multiple ways to look at it, and you're ignoring other important factors, anyways.

1. You can have kids who remain ignorant about music production... but you can also have kids who gain increased interest and stick with it - later becoming amazing producers on the back of developers delivering a solution that was sticky enough to keep them engaged.

Not everyone wants to sit in front of a note pad overthinking 2 bars of music. Some people like a more engaging creative process. It's a circular process of growing marketshare to increase revenue while growing marketshare to increase revenue. Year-over-year performance is kind of important. You cannot consistently improve that with your view of the landscape.

2. Developers need to sell licenses to as many people as possible to keep the doors open. Every new license of FL Studio that is sold, is a potential new license of a plug-in or virtual instrument, or UVI FX, Instruments or Soundware, etc.

If you just ignore large parts of the market, you leave money on the table.

Developers have to pay attention and give those people what they want so that the revenue they generate enables them to deliver the features you want. While also delivering enough revenue to pay their developers/testers/marketing/whatever and generate a profit - ideally a higher profit than the quarter/year prior.

----

Every thread about this stuff ends in people being extremely offensive, dismissive and displaying vast ignorance of the situation.

The same people being demeaned are those who enable these companies to deliver the solutions you ask for. R&D, Innovation... development, period... is not for free.

This really isn't a theoretical matter. It's purely economics. Otherwise, the developers wouldn't spend the time and money developing features erudite customers complain about.

----

And of course, there can always come a time when the market becomes saturated - especially with long-running product lines... at which point layoffs [and/or acquisitions] are pretty much par for the course because most businesses cannot run on high operating costs and decreasing revenues for long.

[VariKusBrainZ]

This drag and drop of royalty free loops has been around for at leats 20 years only it started on CDs. Nothing to be ‘afraid’ of

I think theyll be more mesmerised by stem separation

[apoclypse]

I'm glad Image-Line have finally got the Cloud stuff released, that they obviously have wanted to for a while. I remember them hinting at some of the online stuff way back last year, before the release of 21.0, when they decided they'd have to postpone it to get v21 officially released in 2022.

The main reason I'm glad though, is that now this is out of the way, they should hopefully be able to turn their attention back to core DAW improvements. I've read they are working on a new mixer and playlist features, because they have been requested by so many users.

Personally, my first priority would be to improve the window management of the DAW, so that the various panels and editors are better and more efficiently controlled and not opening randomly over the screen.

And core elements, like the playlist and mixer not continually shifting and re-sizing of their own accord. Less clicking to perform basic functions and customized key binding is also needed and would be much appreciated to improve the DAW's workflow.

Image-Line have done a lot of good things and they are definitely improving the DAW overall. So I believe they'll get to these issues ... eventually.

Yep. I hate window management in general. It would be nice if they at least gave us the choice of having a sectioned UI, like Studio One\Logic etc.

I agree in the resizing part. The browser constantly resizes on its own. It's annoying. It's also inconsistent. When click on the cloud icon you see the text for each section, when you click on library or sound etc it just shows the icons and then resizes itself. Very annoying.

[Fornicras]

I feel bad that I switched to Studio One about 2 years ago when I see the improvements and features of FL Studio. FL is still the best for me when it comes to beat making but it's very lacking when it comes to audio editing/comping/recording and mixing.

Studio One features and updates (so far, since version 5) are usually for their mixing workflow and that's it.
I almost hate to produce in Studio One because of its browser.

I also don't want to use separate DAWs (FL for Production, S1 for Recording and Mixing). I don't know what to do, to be honest, I feel lost.

Just a little rant.

Have fun with the new features FL users!

[FarleyCZ]

1. You can have kids who remain ignorant about music production... but you can also have kids who gain increased interest and stick with it - later becoming amazing producers on the back of developers delivering a solution that was sticky enough to keep them engaged.

That is a fair point and I agree that that's the nice part about the whole thing. <3

Not everyone wants to sit in front of a note pad overthinking 2 bars of music. Some people like a more engaging creative process. It's a circular process of growing marketshare to increase revenue while growing marketshare to increase revenue. Year-over-year performance is kind of important. You cannot consistently improve that with your view of the landscape.

I don't agree there. I don't think measuring qualitty of music by it's market share is a good idea. That itself is stopping inovation in terms of art. People (listeners) will always gravitate towards what they know first. True novelty needs time to sink in. But if you get bombarded by another piece of content before you allow that novelty to sink in, you'll stay in your line pretty much forever as a listener. ...but yeah, market share has grown. Yeey. Success.

2. Developers need to sell licenses to as many people as possible to keep the doors open

True. But Image Line kinda scr*wed up by being successful on that front. They offered massive value to customers by not charging for upgrades. That created much slower income flow in the long run, that they now need to compensate for with all the cloud solutions they just introduced.

Every new license of FL Studio that is sold, is a potential new license of a plug-in or virtual instrument, or UVI FX, Instruments or Soundware, etc.

But ... if I pay for FL studio with a lot of synths already and massive library of amazing loops that I can't create on my own and are ready to use, why would I bother to pay for and learn anything else? Especially in this TikTok economy where content production conistency is vital for success. Nobody ain't got time to sit in front of a synth or piano when you need to post today's TikTok dance song. And ImageLine just offered everything to do so in one monthly billed package. I believe that the efect is actually quite opposite. Why would you expad a DAW, that can do everything under the sun and then some? It's the same thing Apple does for ages. Look at how they ecosystem'd Tile conpany to death with Airtags. I see massive paralels here. FL studio users won't need anything else. Why would they? I'm affraid it will decrease other developer's earnings a little.

If you just ignore large parts of the market, you leave money on the table.

Again. Yes. But at the expanse of kids that actually want to say something by their music. They will be burried under the weight of all the "loops 009, 91383 and 3493 keymatched, mixed and AI mastered" songs. It's not cheapening the value. Honestly ment songs will always be more meaningful. But they will drown in the sea of loop remixes. Nobody will find them. The distribution platforms will outgrow their manageability. Spotify will be the Facebook of music, essentially.

Developers have to pay attention and give those people what they want so that the revenue they generate enables them to deliver the features you want. While also delivering enough revenue to pay their developers/testers/marketing/whatever and generate a profit - ideally a higher profit than the quarter/year prior.

Yes. But so IL should. They should let me pay them for upgrades ... instead of giving them away and then trying to make up for the losses by engineering the quickest way to over-saturate already saturated market we've seen yet.

Every thread about this stuff ends in people being extremely offensive, dismissive and displaying vast ignorance of the situation.

The same people being demeaned are those who enable these companies to deliver the solutions you ask for. R&D, Innovation... development, period... is not for free.

This really isn't a theoretical matter. It's purely economics. Otherwise, the developers wouldn't spend the time and money developing features erudite customers complain about.

I'm 100% all with you on this one. Developers need a good model (be it even subscription, Kilohearts are prime example how to do Subscription right IMO) to stay afloat. I laugh at all the "KEEP MY SOFTWARE UPDATED FOREVER AND FOR FREE" posts as well. But I don't hate the model IL created. I hate the evident side-effects this will have on how society understands music. Essentially what I mean is: Combinig Splice and Distrokid into one product is not a good idea for the future of the artform.

Dunno. I understand a lot of what you're saying, agree with a lot of it too ... but I still have mixed feelings about what has been introduced here.

[apoclypse]

I feel bad that I switched to Studio One about 2 years ago when I see the improvements and features of FL Studio. FL is still the best for me when it comes to beat making but it's very lacking when it comes to audio editing/comping/recording and mixing.

Studio One features and updates (so far, since version 5) are usually for their mixing workflow and that's it.
I almost hate to produce in Studio One because of its browser.

I also don't want to use separate DAWs (FL for Production, S1 for Recording and Mixing). I don't know what to do, to be honest, I feel lost.

Just a little rant.

Have fun with the new features FL users!

Yeah. For browsing I just use ADSR sample manager as a separate open app since the sample browser in S1 is a bit lacking. I do like the Instruments and Effects plugins browser works more than FLStudio, mostly because FLStudio just shows a really long list.