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.

FL Studio Mobile, previously announced for iOS, is now available for iPhone, iPod touch, and, in an “HD” edition, on iPad 1 and 2. The biggest feature: if you’re an FL Studio user, you can take your projects and load them on the mobile version for on-the-go editing. That makes FL the first major, non-Apple studio app to do round-trip workflows between mobile and desktop.

The release is also causing some mainstream outlets to notice, like BetaNews, who suggest this breaks a 13-year, Windows-only FL Studio run. That’s not entirely fair: Image-Line have released cross-platform software. The issue is that the full-blown FL Studio desktop version is deeply tied to Windows. FL Studio Mobile is a ground-up app. But it’s still big news.

BetaNews notes that the round-trip isn’t as easy as you might like:

Like Garageband for iPad, pulling files off of the iPad is kind of a chore. In order to load FL Studio Mobile projects into FL Studio for Windows, users need version 10.0.5 or later of FL Studio, and files must be dragged and dropped from the FL Studio Browser (or Windows folder) to the desktop one by one. There’s not yet an easy export feature for fast file sharing.

That could change, though, if the application adds iCloud support – and even this, as described, sounds easy enough to me.

Other features:

• Piano keys, drum pads with flexible layouts – so you can arrange, say, multiple stacks of keys or drums the way you like.
  Instruments, kits, and loops included.
• 99-track sequencer, piano roll and step sequence editing.
• Import/export not only FL Studio projects, but WAV and MIDI files, too. Unfortunately, sample loading isn’t available yet, but is coming.

An Android version is also in the works:

What about Android OS? It’s on the roadmap, stop nagging! We have a development team working on a low-latency Android audio-engine and there are many screen resolutions and device specifications to consider, it’s not as simple as you may think

FL Studio for Mac is still in the “forget about it and stop asking” category, so no change there:

Does this mean FL Studio on Mac OSX soon? FL Studio Mobile is not a port of the Windows version of FL Studio. It is the product of a completely separate development team, and code, so FL Studio Mobile, while compatible with FL Studio has no impact on FL Studio development and vice versa.

Just expect to read about this everywhere, thanks to a viral contest Image-Line is running. Guys, take it easy: I think people would blog your FL Studio Mobile without having an iPad to win.
FL Studio Mobile News

Mobile music suites date back to the first PDAs; the Palm has long been a stand-out platform with apps like Chocopoolp’s wonderful Bhajis Loops. The iPod Touch and iPhone have been a hotbed for development, thanks to sharing development frameworks with the Mac. That led our iPod/iPhone software round-up to be bursting with good stuff. But lacking a final SDK from Apple, many of the options were, admittedly, early in development or toy-like.

Intua’s new BeatMaker, a complete music studio, looks more like a real music tool. The basic functionality:

• Mobile sampler: 16 pads for editable sample playback, slicing, and pattern recording. (I hoped this meant you could actually record on the fly, but it looks like you can’t.)
• Step sequencer with an interesting-looking interface, pictured above
• Effects: two channels with beat-synced delay, 3-band EQ, and bit-crushing distortion

Intua Product Page

We’ll be watching for news from Apple this week, which should give us a better sense, hopefully, of what Apple’s developer plans are. To me, the restrictions so far (limiting features, eliminating multi-tasking, and requiring distribution via official Apple outlets) dampen some of the appeal of the platform. Likewise, so far we’ve seen basically “hacked” development – and quite frankly, it’s been more interesting as a result. We should know soon more about what officially-sanctioned development will look like for music. BeatMaker could be one of the first generation of apps to fit that category.

And lest I just seem sour, to me the larger point is that OSes come and go; what we’re really seeing is richer capabilities on mobile devices. Apple certainly deserves credit for making that vision most apparent in a shipping device.