I’m sure that quite a few of you lovable nutcases know that I have been using FL studio as my main DAW for a few years now, and I really enjoy the way it’s structured and how it offers a super friendly way for beginners to get started making music. However, I recently have been putting in a lot more effort to learning Ableton Live for a few reasons I’ll explain over time.
I just wanted to make a thread to give my half a cent and show what others might find if switching over from good old FL.
First off, I’ll start with the general differences for today.
FL Studio looks to prioritise a “beat assembling” UI. The way that the sample browser and playlist are laid out convinces you to drag and drop, which means creating basic mixdowns is super easy. The time streching in FL is a tad annoying, as you have to physically enter the sample configuration window to change the tempo of files with nothing embedded. Ableton on the other hand basically does the stretching for you, and if you’d rather do it yourself you can easily just type the sample’s BPM in, or disable automatic stretching in the settings. As a bonus, Ableton slaps warp points onto any samples for quick adjustments or major stretching. Back to best making, the session view in Ableton means that getting to a full mixdown can be slower than FL, but crafting the song structure is a lot simpler and more efficient, especially considering you can record your melodic ideas directly into the arrangement view FROM session view, and tweak samples and loops as you go.
Another point on mixing, you might take a while routing everything up in FL studio, as all plugins have slots on the mixer, that of which has nothing assigned to it by default. Ableton’s plugins are by track, so you can quickly add and remove what you want without having to hook up virtual wires left right and centre. Sample editing is also individual in Ableton, which means there’s no need to create unique samples all the time. That said, the whole send system in Ableton took me a while to get used to, and making a sidechain channel in FL studio is far more visually logical.
But anyway, that’s just a tiny sample of some of my thoughts. Feel free to debate, discuss, and even add to my thoughts as much as you want.
I’ve been griping for about a year about it, so you kind of know my take, but using a real DAW for organizing and composing real tracks and keeping FL around for completely unhinged madness is kind of my mode. Expect nothing more or less and you can have the best of both worlds.
Now allow me to talk with you about our lord and savior, Renoise
I’m curious how much you (and others) use Session View vs Arrangement View. They’re obviously very different tools and each do their thing, but it seems from my limited experience that people tend to gravitate towards one or the other as a workflow in Live.
I rarely if ever use Session View, and never for composition. I mostly chalk that up to the type of things I’m interested in creating, but in the back of my mind I think it may be an artifact of using more “traditional” DAWs for so long (Cakewalk, Cubase, etc) and that the whole left-to-right, top-to-bottom multitrack thing just makes more sense to me. I guess I’m wondering if someone that doesn’t have that baggage approaches Live differently.
Of course, arrangement view is just better to use, but I think that session view is really underrated and has some crazy good uses for being able to reach some ideas for live performances - hence Ableton Live. The interface for session view also just makes a lot of sense to me, and for somebody with a shit ton of percussion loops it’s a lot of fun to use…
Funny thing, that. I initially started using Live specifically for live performance. My first version was v2 in 2003, for looping and sample triggering with a live band. That was back before it was a DAW or could use VSTs, and was basically only Session View but without any sequencing or editing capabilities. Stomping on pedals and letting a laptop handle everything was really cool and let us ditch hauling around a bunch of fragile and expensive outboard gear (though I had several sound guys ask “how the fuck am I suppose to mic a laptop?” lol).
I haven’t played out in years so I don’t have a clue how I’d approach it now, but given everything it does it’s probably still first in class for live electronic music.
Throwing some love towards Ableton. It was the first daw I bought after fucking around with music on four track recorders and free DAWs back in the day. I felt like a damn king walking out of that store with a boxed copy of Ableton 6.
Never liked session view, but my friend used it when we played shows together.
I’ve got Ableton 8, but haven’t touched it much the past few years. This laptop’s a bit too slow for my liking, but I do hope to make some more tunes at some point once I upgrade.
I’d say that Ableton’s definitely got it going in the MIDI department.
While FL Studio has a lot of much nicer and efficient keybinds and neat little shortcuts, Ableton doesn’t, and makes up for it with other features like the “insert step” button and little things you didn’t know you wanted or needed like a note preview toggle button. As the MIDI and general shortcuts are a lot different to FL, I struggled a bit initially trying to write simple melodies, but it’s really not too much different or worse than FL.
One thing that’s really nice to me is that all MIDI in Live is separated. When I say this, I mean you can individually edit MIDI and not have to worry about creating unique samples, or having the right instrument/pattern selected before creating your tunes. Also, forget about accidentally copying over another pre-existing track when you duplicate or extend clips like in FL, because Live automatically deletes and replaces the overlap segment, which means actually MAKING something is so much easier.
As a more critical note, the way you extend MIDI clips that aren’t long enough in live is such a pain in the ass. You have to create the exact length you need, or waste your time slowly dragging out the window to the right size. FL is the clear winner in that aspect, and you can also extend audio clips out into nothing with FL. Live likes to repeat the clip when extended, which sucks ass for samples that aren’t an exact number of beats/bars long.
I probably won’t update this every day, but it’s fun to write
If you’re talking about how you can layer things in FL’s playlist and not even know they’re interfering with each other, yeah. Pretty much no editor (video, audio or otherwise) has such a ridiculous ‘feature’. This is primarily why I avoid the playlist at all costs if I can.
I know they keep creating little GUI toggle menus to disable annoying shit like this, but having default features that are so easily mistaken for bugs or ineptitude doesn’t do them any favors.
You can latch a note by changing the loop points so that they don’t retrigger the note. MIDI typically isn’t killed until the note ends, so with some exceptions and clean handling, this will mimic the absence of a ‘note off’ signal.
I don’t have Live, but they cloned the functionality. Check out where my start and loop points are and you’ll see what I mean. By the way, this is just tier one. You can download the free version of Voltage (or even PlugData) and I’ll show you play gate note latching where you don’t even need the clip. But otherwise, most people just trigger this from the clip launcher, even if they’re using it in arrangement view. Works every time™
While FL Studio is a great blank space and quite the powerhouse for the price you pay for it, it pales in comparison to the stock inclusivity of Ableton Live. One thing that got me into making music with Ableton so much faster was the sheer amount of good quality audio and stock plugins included that I could just easily pick and remove like it’s nothing. I know some people use exclusively 3rd party plugins, but I stick with the simple stuff, and Ableton’s got all of this great quality stuff straight off the bat.
There are some aspects where I think FL Studio wins here, like their reverb and EQ 2 plugins being a bit more powerful and easier to use compared to Ableton’s, but the detail is minimal and honestly doesn’t matter too much. When paired with the ability to simply drag and drop on to tracks to apply effects, I don’t think I’ve ever had to push myself to change up a part of a song, because it’s just so much easier than FL Studio.
Now, FL Studio and Ableton Live both have groupable plugins (Patcher and Just… Racks, I suppose.) but when making big FX chains, I think Ableton is just so much more enjoyable to operate and use than Patcher. I said this before - FL Studio’s got great visual logic, but Ableton makes more sense overall, I think. Also, Ableton’s got some really simple and just overall useful little plugins, especially the utility plugin which I’d usually have to get from Serum’s FX module.
Anyway, I’m running out of ideas to write. I might as well just say “I’m an Ableton simp now,” but I’ll try and cover as many points as possible.
This whole post is great. I’ve been wanting return to this type of system: “Faux” Daw >>>> “Real” DAW. I used to be Ableton/Reason dude until Abletits canceled ReWire (RIP). ***It’s fine. I didn’t have hundreds of project files setup for it (Fuckin record everything from your FauxDAW to your RealDAW people).
I’m not interested in using Reason anymore except for sifting through project backlogs when I need to. I AM interested in something fresh and new like FL Studio. This thread has reminded me of this. Thanks @Mecha_Twitchy for the in depth analysis.
IIRC most of Live’s reverbs start out in ‘eco’ mode. Once you switch those over, you’ll see the light . I also believe (and it’s been a while, so I should really download the demo to help illustrate my point better) they added a few additional reverbs over the past few years that FL still doesn’t rival, with some really powerful algo switchers that you might’ve missed on first glance.
TL;DR: There are actually quite a lot of separate reverbs within their reverb units, if you find the switches for them. None of this even scrapes the surface of M4L, but you can easily import ones you find across the web with just a click.
Last but not least, dear atheist, once you start easily modulating your filters and EQs on the fly with M4L modulators without even having to open the greater M4L or a device like Patcher, you’ll see how good those can be, too. Bitwig does this 1,000% better, but I’ll save that for another time
I cringe hard when someone says FL Studio is not “a real DAW” in 2025. Of course, I know that YOU know what you are doing musically, as opposed to the legions of clowns who have been shitting on FLS for years because someone someday decided it was the thing to do, and Live was “cool” or something.
So my question is : why do you call FLS “not a real DAW”?
As a side note, I absolutely love the Channel rack and what you can do with it for composing before building your song in the Playlist. Somehow, people think that is a hindrance, when it actually is an amazing tool to have… and that boggles my mind that so many people miss that part.
The only one thing that sucks about FLS is the no MPE/midi 2.0 issue. The devs made it clear that they are not interested in making MPE fully compatible in FLS, and that it won’t ever happen. They have given no timeline re: midi 2.0 implementation
There are easy ways around that. You can simply change the mixer channel of your plugin in the channel rack using the mouse wheel, so 2 plugins go to the same mixer channel.
If you don’t want to do that, you can use “save preset as” and drag the FX plugin to the mixer channel that you want it in as well.
Additionally, you can save anything as a template nowadays - including your FX chains.
I literally NEVER use virtual wire cabling in FLS.
Yeah, I don’t get it either, and I say that as someone with a real preference for Live. Plenty of great artists are working in FL without a problem, making great music.
It’s all 99.9% workflow, anyway - it’s faster or more convenient to do process A in DAW X than in DAW Y. If you do A constantly, that’s probably a selling point, but Y likely has a way to do it as well. For all the fanboy flamewars about these things, I rarely if ever see a legitimate situation where someone bumped their head on a true limitation of a DAW that was solved in a different software (though I wasn’t aware of the MIDI 2 situation and that’s an interesting if limited case); they’re way more alike than not. All these things shit out the same waves. Everything else is just splitting hairs about how a person likes to work.
If Ableton exploded tomorrow or someone told me I could only use FL going forward, I’m not going to stop making music. Every sound or track I produce can be made in other software, maybe less conveniently in some situations, but nothing I couldn’t adapt to given a bit of time.
There are many threads on the Image-Line forum. The screencap below is a quick snapshot for those who can’t login/see the thread. It’s developed more inside the thread.
I mean… I understand that it’s far from a priority for them. But when pretty much any other competitor has figured and implemented full MPE compatibility (sometimes years ago) and you have a shiny ROLI Seaboard that is mostly gathering dust because you can’t record it the way it’s supposed to be recorded, it sucks.
(note that I have considered learning the basics of Bitwig to be able to at least record & export .wav performances made on the Seaboard, but it seems like a lot of pain - learning another DAW’s interface/workflow just for that)
Yeah, all that makes sense (I didn’t dig up my Image-Line login to go through the whole thread, just basing on the screenshot), except the whole “nobody has these things” argument at the beginning seems both dimwitted and argumentative. I get that it’s not necessarily easy to implement, and it sounds like they have some existing spaghetti code issues that complicates it, but just saying they’re not prioritizing it because some tech support guy polled his friend base of five people and determined there wasn’t a need is a lame excuse.
Reaper, maybe? If you have any experience with track-based/ProTools-lineage DAWs, it’s pretty straightforward, and at least it’s free. Might be something to mess with as far as getting wav out. Just frustrating that you’d have to do so.
