‘

FL Studio 8 is here, more or less — as I write this, Release Candidate 3 is available for download, but the final version appears imminent. So, as other tools have matured, why is it that FL is one of those few programs that seems to attract real love?

The press release for the new FL Studio (known to everyone except developer Image-Line as “Fruity Loops”) keeps using the term “DAW.” I have nothing against that, even though DAW as a term has little do with music. (It is the sound English speakers make when they see a cute little lambie or puppy. You know, “dawwwww!….”) It’s a familiar situation: Ableton Live, whose developers came up with the far more descriptive “live sequencing instrument” for their product, felt (rightfully) that Live could compete with more traditional programs and so adopted an otherwise meaningless name. As in that case, FL’s combination of MIDI and audio tools, plug-in hosting and (cough, Reason!) audio recording means you can produce music end to end with it. (Too bad the acronym “DAW” does nothing to hint at what it means.)

What it means to be Fruity

  So, it’s not that FL isn’t a DAW — it’s that it is something else that other programs may not be. I think it needs its own acronym, especially with FL 8 stronger than ever after nearly a decade of ever-maturing releases, a passionate audience, and a dedication to talented developer Arguru, whom the music software community lost last year.

Some nominations:

Insane Idiosyncratically-Awesome Music Suite — IIAMS! Wait, no, that sounds like dog food. (Dawwwww!)

Toybox of Sonic Wonders — TOWS.

Beat Bonanza Tracker Sequencer Hybrid — pronounced BbbbbTHHS!, which is the sound I suggest you make at anyone who suggests FL isn’t capable of serious music or “sounds bad.” (Try to produce some spittle in the process.)

(your superior idea here)

Why am I making a fuss over this? Let me see if I can boil it down:

• FL’s approach to sequencing is like nothing else. Rich MIDI sequencing tools meet up with a unusually-focused approach to patterns and loops. It’s really a kind of hybrid between conventional sequencers and music trackers, blending some of the best of each. At first, that can make it confusing to use, but once you wrap your head around the combination, it can be very powerful.
• It’s kind of a ridiculous value. US$50-$100 buys you a perfectly usable version of the program — not a stripped-down, crippled version; you even get some extras. The most you can spend is about US$199-299, or $399 if you absolutely have to have it in a box. Opening that collection is like walking into an art museum of plug-in development, from avant-garde oddities to classics, with all the bundled noisemakers. Only it’s a museum where you can lick the paintings. For soft synth lovers, even the $500 Logic Pro bundle or new $1000 Ableton suite can’t compare in sheer value.
• It keeps getting better. Cheap and free upgrades keep you getting new features. FL has gradually matured from a nifty niche tool to one of the most mature programs out there. And download versions have lifetime free upgrades.
• It’s not for everyone. Some people find the interface maddening. Its kitchen-sink approach may frighten away people who don’t have an appetite for synths and sequencing. And it generally seems to attract a special crowd of FL lovers. But that’s why we love it. And go ahead, hate it if you don’t get it — FL lovers won’t care.
• It’s a reason to use Windows. Because of the way it was developed, FL almost certainly won’t be appearing on the Mac any time soon. But FL can make Windows look better, with rock-solid platform support, Vista support on day one when a lot of other things were broken, and rich ASIO support. It even installs ASIO4ALL by default so you can use the headphone jack on your laptop and other non-ASIO hardware. You could do that yourself. But it shows they care.

  MIDI is back, baby. Or to say it another way: musicians still care about how to manipulate notes, rhythms, and timbral control. That means that, for all the powerful audio-warping tools you pack into a product, the compositional, musical power of software lives and dies on MIDI. But can you really do MIDI any better than it’s been done for the past couple of decades?

Temper would like to try. It’s not MIDI-only — it does audio, too, and has the requisite support for VSTs — but it is a little different from the sequencer perspective. And whereas innovative sequencers lately have been throwbacks to the tracker design, Temper emphasizes modularity and the ability to create shapes. As the developers put it, it’s:

…a MIDI+Audio sequencer with an emphasis on MIDI. Temper is distinguished by two basic design goals: To provide you with tools that operate on sequences as easily as individual events, and to decouple what gets processed by how it gets processed.

Computers are endlessly flexible for music — but how do they function as actual, playable instruments? As computer software matures, finding a way to make these tools more fun to play is increasingly the aim. Native Instruments’ first crack at a “super instrument” with KORE 1 had some fans, but was a disappointment to many others (myself included, even as a fan of NI’s terrific instruments and effects and Reaktor platform). But a lot of us still believed in the potential of what it was doing. That’s why it’s really exciting for me to have caught a first glimpse of what the new KORE 2 looks like. In just about a year and a half, NI has radically changed the application. We expect to get the full version for review soon, but here’s a sneak peak.

With various applications running roughly an annual release schedule, and lots of competition for attention, just what would it take to get me excited about an upgrade to Ableton Live? My list would look something like this:

• Time signatures in Session View scenes, so you can create songs that switch meter or put sets of songs into one big Session file
• The ability to nudge tempo up and down, for electronic music / DJing / changing tempo live for other reasons. (Not everyone wants to stay at 133bpm for four hours.)
• Side-chaining for Compressor, Gate, and Auto Filter
• Anti-aliased processing in Operator, Dynamic Tube, and Saturator, so when you don’t want them to sound glitchy and digital, you have an option
• Export video (warped and unwarped) to files, so Live becomes an alternative video editor and a real scoring tool
• View more than one lane of automation at a time in Arrangement view. (Come on, occasionally you must want to look at volume and a delay setting at the same time, yeah?

That actually basically sums up my wish list for Live, especially the ability to mix meters. I’m not just writing avant-garde music or doing Yes remixes, either; I’ve even heard DJs complain about that.

Is this the full feature list for Live 7? No way. Is this what you’d use to market Live? Absolutely not. Is this, item for item, exactly what I would wish for in a new version of Live? Heck, yes. I expect your list may look different, but personally, I love upgrades that address the little things that make a good tool into a great tool. I can’t wait to get my hands on the first beta to see how the implementation feels, and see if it’s as good in practice as it looks on paper … or pixels, anyway.

And in the “something I’d wish for if I had imagined to wish for it,” there’s also a new range of Live instruments based on Applied Acoustics’ fantastic physical models for analog synths, electric pianos, and plucked-string instruments. In the form of Analog Studio, Lounge Lizard, and String Studio, respectively, those represent to me some of the best-sounding software synths available, and unquestionably the best realistic physical models of strings that are commercially available. They’re reborn as Live synths.

The only potential disappointments: Ableton still isn’t talking about the fruits of their collaboration with Cycling ‘74, though I expect we may hear that information soon. And Ableton’s timing isn’t so hot: they just introduced a bundle of all the new instruments with Live itself for US$999, calling it Live Suite. A month ago, that would have been competitively priced with Apple’s Logic Studio, except — whoops. Now Logic Studio costs just US$499. Ableton isn’t in the comfortable position of selling computers as well as software, as Apple is (to say nothing of phones or, erm, pods), but I imagine this will still make this a slightly tougher sell, at least on the Mac. I don’t think it’s a deal killer for Live or Live Suite, but I figured I’d mention it before you do in comments. (Okay, now, go ahead; tell us what you think.) On the other hand, hey, it’s Live, and Logic still isn’t Live. If you don’t need the extra instruments, Live’s cost is the same as it ever was, and the a la carte approach can absolutely mean you don’t wind up with things you don’t need.

And speaking of Live, there’s quite a lot more in Live 7 itself — some potentially more exciting than the new instruments. Here’s the feature list:

Rax, the clever audio effect and instrument host for Mac, got a major update last year with performance rigs, custom visualizer support, and a slick UI designed by plasq. It’s an ideal tool for loading up some instruments and effects and playing on your Mac, especially if you want software that gets out of your way while you play another instrument or sing and don’t need a full app like Logic or Live onstage. But it never caught on with Mac users, even after I wrote a glowing review in Macworld. And it has certainly been overshadowed by more popular plasq products for the general Mac market, like Comic Life and the upcoming Skitch. So it was clear this unknown gem needed a new home.

Happily, Rax has now changed hands to another of our favorite small developers, Audiofile Engineering. Their Wave Editor has won over CDM’s game composer / contributor Brent, so we’ll be curious to see how they handle Rax. They’ll be supporting existing customers (few of them as there are out there, I expect there’s a good chance they’re reading this). Their 2.1.0 update is a minor release to bring Rax into the AE fold:

Deckadance, from the makers of FL “Fruity Loops” Studio, is now shipping. No word on the Mac version in development, but Windows, at least, is shipping now. We’re excited to try it out for all the reasons we were when we first saw it, and now we have some additional details to flesh in:

Cockos’ REAPER, the lightweight audio and MIDI multitrack editor from the creator of Winamp, is coming to (Intel/PPC) Mac, too. There’s a full discussion of the update on the REAPER forum. It’s an “alpha” build, but comes as a surprise: REAPER may have a lot more appeal as the “standard” lightweight host as a cross-platform app. Finished version is due “Q4″ of this year.

REAPER has been getting endless updates of other kinds, as well, including this new “Stealth” color scheme which looks suspiciously like SONAR to me. (Sorry to be harsh, but it was fugly before. If it’s SONAR-y now, that’s a huge improvement.) If you want to try it, it’s downloadable as “uncrippled unexpiring shareware.” Remember when most shareware worked that way? That’s a retro trend I could get behind.

REAPER

Rather than praise or criticize REAPER, what I’d really like to know is, are any readers using it? What do you think so far?

Welcome back to another installment of “Straight Out of No Cash”. Despite repeated delays, death threats, acts of God, ElectroPlankton, and a laptop catching on fire, I’m finally back to give more bargain basement tips, tricks, and goodies for the Windows-centric set.

It used to be the case only 5 years ago that one had to spend money, sometimes several hundred for even the most basic DAW software. In recent years however, there has been such a large explosion in the amount of Windows freeware that it’s now gotten to the point where it’s possible to get a pretty good plug-in host sequencer without spending a single red cent. In this week’s article, I will examine four kick-ass free sequencer/plug-in hosts for Windows. Two free trackers, and then two free-while-in-beta sequencers.

So, you decided to spring for that Intel Mac. And now you’ve got a plug-in that refuses to run, because it’s PowerPC-only, not a Universal Binary for Intel. Sorry, but only plug-ins that have been updated as Universal Binaries will run in a Universal audio host. Fortunately, there’s away around it, and it’s even fully documented by Apple:

Intel-based Macs: Forcing a Universal application to run with Rosetta [Apple Support Doc]

That’s it. You force your audio application to run under Rosetta, as a PowerPC-native application. During the period when I had a MacBook Pro for testing, I was surprised to discover audio applications are usable. Performance is degraded — your Core Duo suddenly feels like a 400 MHz G4 (apologies to Titanium owners) — but they run. My advice: render any of those old plug-ins as audio, then reload; in Ableton Live, for instance, temporarily force the software to run in Rosetta, bounce the track with the plug-in you need, then re-load Universal and play the audio. Not the most elegant solution, but it’ll get you by.

Note that it’s not just us audio folks who have to suffer through this — the same is true for graphics and Web plug-ins. But now you can finally run that free PowerPC-native 8-bit music plug-in we saw earlier this week.