FL Studio’s live performance functionality has been teased for some time online, attracting enraptured eyeballs and plenty of discussion online. Now, you can give it a try for yourself in the new FL Studio 10.5 beta. My prediction: it’s definitely huge for FL Studio die-hards, but it could also attract some “lapsed” FL users back to the fold, and it’s almost certainly a reason to fire up a copy of Windows. (That’s the sound of a bunch of Boot Camp installations.)

The best way to see what the performance mode is about is in the video above. It’s actually a bit more basic than some of the teasers we’ve seen – there isn’t quite as much fancy trigger-mode action – but it’s easier to follow how the software works.

I’m of the mind that music and music technology alike benefit from a range of ideas, even conflicting ideas. What I like about FL Studio’s approach to performance is that it isn’t exactly like what you get with Ableton Live. It’s not unrelated – we’re looking at several controllers designed for Ableton, and there are certainly noticeable similarities in the ability to trigger blocks of time, some owed to Ableton and some more generally attributable to loop and sample tools over the years. But you get some new angles, and there’s really no mistaking this for anything other than FL. A few highlights, evident in the video:

• Audio, automation, and pattern clips in any combination
• Move directly from a linear arrangement to live triggering – something unique to this tool.
• Combine a bunch of controllers – and use a range of stuff (Akai APC, Novation Launchpad, and Korg kontrolPAD make appearances)
• Slice clips horizontally into more clips (that’s definitely not possible directly in Ableton’s Session View)
• Novel triggering modes and arrangements – a bit like Follow Actions, as some Ableton users have noted, but with some unique twists, and again, all in a linear arrangement view.

More videos in Image-Line’s development series, or read the manual.

I love this slicing workflow, too, using Slicex and not just the Playlist:

It’s really that moment where you take your finished, linear arrangement and start remixing it in non-linear fashion – without having to switch software modes or resample the content – that I think is a big deal. (It’s especially nice when you slice up existing bits of that arrangement even further.) This is not only something you can’t do directly in Ableton Live, but it’s distinct from live performance workflows in a lot of other hardware and software.

Now, whether that’s actually musically useful is another question, and certainly the musical result in these videos is not distinguishable from what people are doing with Ableton – for better or for worse.

But, then, that’s really down to you, the users, as much as the tool.

FL Studio 10.5 is, according to developer Image-Line, a step on the way to the finished FL Studio 11.

This should also tantalize some users (and, I hope, attract some of our cleverer CDM readers and FL users):

We are looking for input from iOS (iPad/iPhone/iPod touch) and Android users to help with touch-based support/scripting/ideas for Performance Mode (see left).

More on that, in case you missed it in FL’s newsletter.

For working directly on mobile, FL Studio mobile has also gotten an update.

Full details of what’s in 10.5 from Image-Line:

• Performance Mode – Trigger Clips using your mouse, touch screen, typing keyboard or MIDI controller.
• New controllers supported – APC20/40, Launchpad, Block, MASCHINE / MASCHINE MIKRO, padKONTROL
• Unique controller MIDI input port – Controllers can now be assigned unique input & output ports for feedback.
• Linking includes MIDI input port – Links now use MIDI input ports to avoid conflict between controllers
• New Content Library – The content library has received a complete overhaul based on user input.
  Options > Project general settings > Play truncated notes in clips – Restores notes overlapping slice points in Pattern Clips.
• Horizontal/Vertical movement locking – Shift (horizontal lock) & Ctrl (vertical lock) when moving items.
• Piano roll click & hold functions – Glue notes, Mouse wheel velocity change, Mouse wheel tool select.
• Piano roll – Brush tool: Monophonic step mode (hold shift for old behavior). Chop chords: Strum & Articulate tools.
• Improved Tap Tempo & Fine control – Updated algorithm + nudge control for Performance Mode.
• Instrument Channels – Ctrl+mouse wheel on Channel button to change the mixer track.
• Stay open sub-menus – Right click to check several menu items without closing them.
• Plugin Picker – Start typing plugin names to highlight entries.
• Right-click data enter – Most controls now allow a Right-click option to type in values.

10.5 Beta [Image-Line]

If you’re looking for a way of triggering sounds in live performance, but you want to meld that notion with the sequencer rather than play a drum machine-style sampling instrument, your commercially-available options are limited. And it seems, in particular, new creations simply work the way Ableton Live’s Session View does. Bitwig, a new DAW, struck many observers (myself included) to be strikingly close to Ableton’s Session View. More recently, a homebrewed effort for the tracker Renoise also aped Ableton’s interface.

Today’s appearance of the much-anticipated (well, by FL Studio users, anyway) Performance Mode is something different. Seen in a new alpha of the Software Formerly Known as Fruity Loops, Performance Mode builds on FL’s existing metaphor for queuing up samples, the Playlist. A few observations:

You can go directly from FL’s Playlist into this performance triggering mode. There isn’t a separate interface metaphor; instead, choosing Performance Mode unlocks new interactive playback options.

The triggering and position options aren’t quite like what we’ve seen before. Ableton Live provides the ability to quantize triggers and has long allowed interactive clip behaviors so that clips trigger other clips (Follow Actions). But FL has some new options. Triggering – first getting a clip playing – and position – have independent quantization options, for more complex rhythmic options. “Motion” options let you play through and then stop and perform other behaviors.

By the time the Novation Launchpad is controlling the action, FL resembles mlr and its descendants, the unique family of Max patches originated by Brian Crabtree on his monome project, more than they do Ableton Live. Now, arguably, you could rotate your head ninety degrees and look at Ableton, so that clips in Session view proceeded in time from left to right rather than top to bottom. But because all of this lives in FL’s Playlist, the workflow certainly feels different, and that detail of moving from left to right is pretty fundamental. While the results here seem very much like the monome, I could also imagine someone using the same features to go in a different direction. And all of this looks very, very fast.

The push to escape the shadow of Ableton Live – and even the monome – seems to be a difficult one. What’s your take: is this a new direction, or more of the same? Die-hard FL Studio users, are you interested? And will this interest anyone who isn’t a die-hard FL fan?

Not really directly on-topic, but for anyone who thinks FL Studio is entirely for people making 90s-style trance or something, here’s a pop-sounding Russian tune, and behind-the-scenes with the artist on how it was made, by Andrew Maze. It’s not really the sort of music I typically listen to – but that’s my point; it really doesn’t matter. (And it is nicely produced, in a way that fits its idiom.)

Thanks to Dario Lupo and Giuseppe Sorce for discussing this functionality on Facebook with me, and to Dario for the tip.

http://www.image-line.com/documents/flstudio.html

Image-Line are quick to attach lots of disclaimers about when the work will be ready, but a teaser video demonstrates they have builds of their FL Studio Mobile software running on Android devices. It looks like a particularly good match for tablets, and is the latest indication that their may finally be a horse race in tablets for music. (Insert more disclaimers here.)

The phrase “low latency” is likely to make prick up some ears. No computer is “zero latency”; digital systems introduce some delay from recording to playback. The quality of the user experience, therefore, is having things happen without too much latency, whether it’s when sounds from a microphone or line input are processed or when a touch event or MIDI input results in a sound. iOS at least puts that latency in the acceptable range. Android devices, meanwhile, have earned complaints. Some of these issues appear to have to do with the way the platform itself works, in scheduling and the hardware abstraction layer, whereas other challenges arise from the variety (and, let’s face it, inconsistent quality) of Android’s various devices.

However, there are signs that developers might make this situation more manageable. We hear there are changes in Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich release that could impact both the way native access to the audio system and scheduling work; it’s too soon to evaluate those changes, because the OS isn’t done yet. But that leads to the other important development: Android developers are beginning to test performance across devices for some harder numbers. Those kinds of tests could benefit from easy software distribution and the (relatively) open source nature of the operating system — or at least, to be fair, from freely distributing genuinely free-software apps for testing. It’s also worth saying that not all applications require low latency, or, indeed, concern themselves with input-to-output latency. (Not all apps use an audio input.)

It’s not yet clear what Image-Line’s own “low latency” engine is about, but it’ll be interesting to watch. First promised in June, at least, it seems Image-Line is making some headway. More details:
http://www.image-line.com/documents/android.html

I’m still far, far from being able to recommend purchasing an Android device for use with music – iOS wins handily. But developers naturally want to look ahead, beyond the present situation to what might be possible in the near future, especially since they’re the ones making the apps. And there, the picture is worth examination.

Didier Dambrin, FL Studio’s original creator, has a new synth entitled Harmor that looks like one to watch. There’s a beautiful crop of new synthesizers this season that could have you yearning for a winter spent with long nights somewhere deep in the Northern Hemisphere, producing new music – see also, to name just one, Cakewalk’s Z3TA+ 2. (Both Harmor and Z3TA+ 2 are Windows-only, so time to boot up the PC or, Mac users, update that Boot Camp partition.) VSTi and native FL Studio support; US$149 but on sale this month for $99.

For some reason, releasing any synth right now involves demonstrating that the kids can make their wobble bass and dubstep with it, but I trust synthesists out there to do other things, too.

Introducing Harmor

Okay, I kind of buried the lead, but I wanted to give the synth its due.

Don’t want to boot into Boot Camp to run FL Studio?

This beta might interest you:
FL Studio for Mac Beta-Testers Wanted [Image Line forum]

Yes, you see that right: it’s FL Studio, aka Fruity Loops, running on the Mac platform. Synthtopia wonders if Hell froze over, but not so fast. Image-Line said they’d never build a Mac version of FL Studio. And they haven’t. The magic here is possible through Codeweavers Crossover, a commercial proprietary technology built on the open source tool WINE. Codeweavers already offers a standalone product that lets you run a variety of Windows (and Linux) software on the Mac, based on the same tech that lets you run Windows software on Linux. Here, Image-Line reports that there’s some additional customization and testing and tweaking that lets this run without further intervention on your part. (WINE can work beautifully, but there are various compatibility wrinkles with specific software – Image-Line and Crossovers have evidently worked specifically on making FL Studio function properly.)

WINE, the underlying technology, is an emulator but not in the sense of a virtual machine, which is how most Windows compatibility tools are implemented. It’s actually a re-implementation of Windows APIs. See WINE myths for more. That means that, once fully tested, FL Studio can run as well on the Mac as on Windows. What you won’t get is Mac-native APIs, meaning the resulting software won’t behave terribly like a typical Mac program. But FL Studio, like much music software, tends to behave in its own way, anyway, so I don’t actually believe that’s a huge deal. Updated: I realize I should say that compatibility issues or unpredictable behavior can be a big deal; I’ll be interested to see if the Mac experience can replicate the Windows experience or you’ll want to still reboot.

If you want to give this a try – and help ensure the quality of the release – beta testers are wanted. See the forum link above.

Apple users may not know the name – FL Studio, formerly Fruity Loops, is a favorite on Windows – but FL is a favorite music making tool of the bedroom computer producer everyman. (Everywoman?) So, its imminent appearance on the iPad tablet is eagerly anticipated, even in the aftermath of GarageBand. Developers Image-Line, an independent software house from Belgium, delivered the first hands-on video today.

It’s worth pointing to the work of stretta, to compare the sorts of things people imagined the iPad would do before it did anything. Formerly of MOTU, and best known as the creator of wonderful patches for the monome grid, he imagined the product demo below before the iPad had even shipped:

The software is a functional prototype running in MaxMSP which I recorded with a screen capture program. I composited this onto a foam core cutout of a picture of an iPad with After Effects. The finger touches are a complex choreographed dance that I had to memorize and perform in one take.

See his blog post today. The video is striking. Of course, I still wonder – what’s the next big idea?

Update – since I seem to be potentially misinterpreted here – yes. These are all ideas seen elsewhere, seen regularly on the Lemur. I’m not making any claim on the novelty of stretta’s original mockup – actually, I’m more amused by how hard it was to try to fake an iPad without one in hand! If there is a lesson here, I’d say it’s ship your ideas, and consider what sorts of ideas other people won’t ship.

The FL Studio community was rocked earlier this month as producer Deadmau5 claimed the use of his samples was “stealing,” even though these samples were bundled with the software and assumed by most to be licensed royalty-free. FL Studio developer Image-Line has not responded to a CDM request for comment, but they did talk to MusicRadar.com. Managing Director Jean-Marie Cannie told that site:

We’ll remove all melodic loops from FL Studio to avoid this kind of stuff in the future but that won’t change a lot I’m afraid. Our demo material has been stolen 1000s of times in the more than 10 years we have been doing this. The difference here is that this time it was stolen from a user that made it big.

I’m going to ignore for a moment the question of how “that won’t change a lot” – people will be able to steal demo content even when it’s not there? That aside, there are two odd things about this story:

1. Image-Line seems to helped create the problem by shipping sample content in software without being clear which license covered that content and which is which, then responded with the inexplicable argument that that sample content was supposed to be for “demo” purposes only (with nothing that I can see to back up that statement, and evidence that precisely the opposite was the case). No one is angry enough to dump FL, because it’s an excellent tool, but I sure hope Image-Line learns from the experience.

2. Many users are nonetheless responding “good riddance” to the loss of sample content.” For a lot of people, the bigger question here really is artistic, and maybe it’s time for computer musicians to draw a line.

“Demo” Samples – or Sample Content?

Let’s go back in time to the samples themselves, before the user DirtyCircuit produced a song with these samples and before Deadmau5’s response. If we give Image-Line the benefit of the doubt, there are two ways they could have avoided trouble. One would be to label what they call “demo material” so that it’s clear it’s not supposed to be used. The other would be to include an explicit license prohibiting certain kinds of use – I’m no fan of legalese, but then they’d be legally covered.

The problem is, they did neither. Image-Line and Deadmau5 seem to have entire fabricated the idea that this is “demo content,” as many FL users and CDM readers have noted.

(highlight mine)

The content is listed under a section called “Packs” in the default content included with FL, in sections called “Loops > Drum Loops” and “Loops > Melody Loops.” Claiming this is “demo” content is downright disingenuous, because the same section includes individual notes of samples of drums and instruments for keymapping and even synth and plug-in presets. To say it was “stolen” has to be one of the oddest comments ever made by a software developer. It almost implies that making any use of default parameters is intellectual property theft, which, while I suppose it’s ideologically pure, would be absurd. Image-Line almost went out of their way to make this content accessible to its users.

These sample packs aren’t mentioned in the documentation, but downloadable sample packs are one of the selling points of the program, and that is in the marketing materials. As near as I can figure, Image-Line actually made up the idea that these were demo samples because they wanted to make Deadmau5 happy.

What Rights You Get with FL

Updated: if this were demo content, it would be covered under the End User License Agreement for FL Studio. The license is explicit in that case:

“The Software and the Demo Songs, in its entirety and each part of it, are protected by Belgian copyright laws, international treaty provisions (Convention of Bern) and European Directives.

You acknowledge and agree that the Software, including but not limited to the source code, the structure and organization, and the Demo Songs in its entirety and each part of it, are proprietary to IL and/or its partners and that IL and/or its partners retain exclusive ownership of all right, title and interest in and to the Software, Demo Songs, documentation and trademarks. As producer(s) of the databases contained in the Software and the product package of the Software IL and/or its partners retain all sui generis rights in the content.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, IL shall in no event claim ownership rights to new and original music made by using the Software.”

EULA for FL Studio

Furthermore, that has been communicated in plain English by Image-Line support:

* You can not use or sell any of the songs/loops that come included with FL Studio. If you want to use parts of it, you can contact the original creator and discuss this issue further with him.

* You can not license, copyright, sell or distribute in any way the individual samples & sounds, or make samples packs out of it.

http://support.image-line.com/knowledgebase/base.php?id=36&ans=41

Of course, you’ll notice an inconsistency here:

1. Image-Line never does make any included sample content royalty-free, which is unprecedented in music software. (The loops that come with programs like GarageBand, Ableton Live, and every other app I can think of are explicitly made royalty-free.)

2. The EULA says only “demo songs,” and is entirely mum on the question of sample packs.

3. The support FAQ says “loops,” but that’s never made clear by the EULA.

It would be correct to say that the Deadmau5 samples would be off-limits if they were part of a demo song. The problem is, what are they doing in the “Packs” section, where it appears to be among other royalty-free samples? Unlike the demo songs and samples, those are free to use in your own songs – you just can’t resell them on a sample disc, for instance.

Here’s what Image-Line says about the samples they provide free when you buy the product. They’re available as a separate download, but then, that doesn’t make this make much more sense.

All samples are royalty-free, which means you can use the samples in your own compositions and songs without paying any further royalties. You are not allowed, however, to resell or redistribute any or all of the samples as a sample pack or sample CD.

The thing is, the demo songs are a completely different part of what ships with FL. You can find various demo songs in a folder called “Cool Stuff.” (You can try all of this out with the FL8 demo.) “Faxing Berlin” is indeed a Deadmau5 song, but the loops from the song just show up in the Packs. There is a Deadmau5 demo song included with FL, but it’s a different song (“That’s not true,” which is oddly appropriate for this situation.)

It’s obvious, then, that Image-Line fumbled the way these samples were distributed and labeled, the way the license was expressed in the user agreement and support, and in their reaction to the whole affair after the case. It’s possible Image-Line didn’t communicate adequately with the artist, that the artist signed away rights without examining the consequences, that the samples actually got put in the wrong folder, or some combination of all of the above. We haven’t gotten clear communication from I-L, though, explaining what the heck happened.

Obviously, the fix is pretty easy:

1. Artists, be careful with your samples, or assume your fans will be able to differentiate. (In fairness, the actual Deadmau5 track is to me obviously superior to the DirtyCircuit “remix.”)

2. Developers, be explicit, both in legal documentation and in communicating to your users.

In the meantime, I’d like to see future versions of FL that are clearly labeled and clearly licensed, and I don’t think there’s anyway to argue in this case that they were. I’d also like to see a clarification from Image-Line of what, in the current EULA and software, actually is licensed to the users, because this isn’t typical of competing packages.

Artistic Response: Presets, Begone!

Some people are, predictably, upset by the whole affair – and I think they have the right to be frustrated with Image-Line for being apparently incapable of handling content that ships with their own software.

The surprise is, a lot of people are actually glad to see the “Loops” out of the Fruity. You can read endless responses from forum members who say this kind of sampling is bad for the perception of the tool, because it overshadows the genuinely creative work a lot of people are doing with it. Once you get out of the legal and developer-specific issues, you really do get into the question of the artistic merit of the sample use. In my view, using a sample – any sample, regardless of license – as the basis of a song without significant modification amounts to plagiarism. It may be perfectly legal, but if you aren’t placing that sample in a new context, and you’re claiming it’s “your” work, you’re doing something dishonest. Now, we can debate all day about where to draw the line, but the problem isn’t sampling, it’s, say, taking a couple of samples, looping them endlessly, and calling it a song. Odds are, you won’t even have to have a debate about that, because a lot of people will simply lose interest musically.

Among many users of a program with “Loops” in its name, and among readers of this site who are themselves often fond of sampling, a lot of people would like to be done with sample content in general. On a simple, practical level, samples you don’t need from other people’s songs can get in the way of your work. A number of readers of CDM said they’d be happy to be done with this sample content and demo songs just to save room on their hard drive. (Happily, some installers give you a choice; I know Cakewalk’s SONAR 8 allows you to uncheck the sample projects on install, only because I just installed it.)

You can read the extensive comments on the previous story, but these two lines from wi_ngo pretty much sum it up:

I LOVE the Grey Album.

I HATE factory patches/loops/presets.

In other words, sampling is fine. Preset content is boring. Sampling without doing anything with those samples is playing a track, not really sampling.

So, most of the frustration at the moment seems to be that Image-Line not only botched the release of these samples in the first place, but isn’t communicating clearly in the aftermath. (I think the latter is the real problem, even more than the former.)

But all fruit, no loops? That sounds just fine to most. And none of this seems to be dampening enthusiasm for Image-Line’s flagship music tool.

Final score:

Deadmau5: 1. More publicity for Faxing Berlin.

DirtyCircuit: 0. The original is better.

Image-Line: 0. Totally muddled the situation before, during, and afterward.

FL Studio: 1. Happily, people still like your software.

Preset content: 0. You’re gone. No one will miss you.

Samples, unmodified, as the core of a song that’s not a “remix”: 0.

Community policing: 10. See also: Crystal Castles. Forget the license, forget the law – in the Web age, music fans have become the final arbiters of what matters – and artistic value matters.

Xfer Sample CD, Anyone?

I had almost forgotten – on top of this comes the oddly-timed news that Deadmau5 will be releasing his own sample CD – yours for a hundred bucks (US). Friend Steve Duda hand-coded some DSP, as well.

Stranger and stranger – Duda says:

“we saw a niche for one geared towards building blocks of EDM with a twist – this one is royalty-free, so it can be used in original productions with no fear of legal repercussions from the original artists who often are sampled on other CD libraries”

Well, unless I missed something, the only legal repercussions I’ve seen from sample libraries are the Deadmau5 FL Studio libraries. I don’t know of any other sample libraries that have uncleared samples on them, as that’d indeed make them worthless. So, no chance this is related to the separate FL issue, is there?

I’m also trying to wrap my head around this one:

One thing for certain, the sounds of the XFER Sample CD will be featured on dance tracks for decades to come.

I enjoy Deadmau5’s music, but to me the idea that this particular sample library will be featured in dance tracks in 2040 is not “for certain.”

(I imagine I’ll still be getting bizarre spam comments on posts I’m writing now on CDM after I’m dead, but that’s another matter.)

In case you’re planning your dance tracks for when you’re 64:

Deadmau5 Xfer Sample CD-ROM presale

Fruity Loops, while a long-time underground favorite of PC music makers, seems to be on a roll at the moment. We were lucky enough to get an FL Studio 8 sneak peak with Didier Dambrin, Image-Line’s lead programmer — one of the great music software artists. Since our French was nonexistent and his English was limited, the scene was something like this: Didier silently tweaks his way around his software, we squint at the screen, and magical sound awesomeness happens.

FL Studio 8′s feature set will evidently be set free gradually, starting with a beta build called “7.4″ you’ll be able to download from the forums. The new features are FL’s combination of sublimely powerful tools and oddly superfluous toys. In the toys category: a live audio visualization you can float around your screen. (I’m guessing they’ll be fun to look at when you’re completely stuck creatively in the middle of a project.) In the sublime category: a new beat slicer that takes Edison several leaps further. Beat slices are MIDI assignable, filters and such are already available, and … well, it’s rather hard to describe, but it’s all put together in a Fruity way that makes it compelling.

The other revelation was that the cult-hit SynthMaker VST creation tool is now being licensed by Image-Line for inclusion with FL Studio. It’s not clear yet what if anything will be unique to this version, but the combination of FL’s tools with custom SynthMaker instruments you’ve built yourself sounds lovely. It should give you something to muse on while we wait on Ableton and Cycling ’74, who are still mum on any product of the partnership they announced last year. No other details yet on FL 8 or FL SynthMaker, but this one’s dead center on our radar.

Ed.: Deckadance DJ software has been on our radar for some time on the DJ software front: lots of MIDI control (with one caveat; see below), agnostic support for multiple vinyl timecode systems, and most interestingly the ability to run the whole app as a VST plug-in. Dreams of loading Deckadance into Ableton Live danced through DJs heads. The app even added built-in support for Nintendo Wii remotes. But the software, from the development house that brought us FL Studio (“Fruity Loops”) was Windows only. No more:

Image-Line has just released the latest beta of Deckadance, 1.20RC3. This version is the first version to include support for OS X. The developers have written on the Deckadance forums that the port to OS X required almost a complete rewrite. Early reports are mostly positive, with a few bugs (mostly on the Windows side reported here and there). Other notable changes include:

• Redesign of the Digital Vinyl System panel. It includes now a real-time signal spectroscope and an easy-to-use interface
• Vinyl timecode control of decks inside Live and Live LE
• Native support for Numark Total Control console

However, there’s no reports of a fix to allow pitch bend messages for deck pitch control, a personal obsession of mine. [Ed.: Wally, fairly sure you're not alone on that! -PK] Still, though, kudos to the Deckadance team for getting the OS X version out the door before the end of the year. Let’s hope 2008 holds great things in store for Deckadance!

1.20RC3 Beta Announcement [Image-Line Forums]
Windows beta download; Mac beta download

(You must be logged into the free Image-Line forums to use the download links.)

Image-Line has also posted a video showing Deckadance running on both Mac and Windows:

Image-Line has also announced a new developer is taking on Deckadance in Argu’s absence:

Image-Line is pleased to hand the baton for Deckadance development to the capable hands of Luis Serrano Cavero. Luis is an experienced developer of DJ tools, including his own DJ midi controller, and brings further inspiration and enthusiasm to the Deckadance project. “We are very proud, and fortunate, to have Luis on the team” said [Jean-Marie Cannie, Managing Director of Image Line Software].

The announcement comes with the release of 1.13, with various bugfixes and improvements, deck sync and monitoring enhancements, and Behringer BCD3000 console support.

As we again offer our condolences, it’s nice to see this developer’s work memorialized and recognized; I hope we get to know more of the faces behind the tools we care about.

Deckadance homepage

We are saddened to learn that Juan Antonio Argüelles, “Argu(ru)”, died Sunday night in a car accident. He was respected as one of the most talented plug-in developers anywhere, as the creator of plug-in house discoDSP, and later a developer of plug-ins for Image-Line. He had a deep role in the creation of FL Studio 7, the sampler DirectWave, and Deckadance.

Some of you probably know more of the details of his work for both discoDSP and Image-Line. If you’d like to share anything about him as a person, or his tools, please do. The tools that developers create are a special thing to all of us in our music and in our creative lives; part of the joy of using software someone else creates is getting to know something of their personality. So, from all the users of his tools and the digital music community, you will truly be missed, Arguru.

Both KVR and our friends at the Spanish-language Hispasonic have running threads of condolences.

Rest in Peace, Arguru [KVR Audio Forum thread]

Fallece Juan Antonio Argüelles, “Arguru” [Hispasonic]

Our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues, and to his fiancee.