I can’t believe how immersed I’ve gotten into FL studio again since the update. Even though I still hate the untethered workflow and somehow can never get MIDI note FX to work (outside of FL’s dedicated devices), Toxic Biohazard, Harmor and Harmless are the shit.
Nag screens be damned, this is a powerhouse. The piano roll is now the most overpowered of its kind in existence. I wish I could just detach the piano roll itself and stick it inside of Bitwig or Renoise.
Still looking for some way to get patcher to handle MIDI note FX, since it picks up on their I/O just fine yet somehow (seemingly) sandboxes itself away from system calls. VSTs also don’t seem to be able to call up MIDI devices and loopbacks, leading me to believe that FL is indeed closing off everything that isn’t FL studio, since other DAWs allow you to route things to wherever.
Deeper explanation if anyone cares
Mostly I use things like Cardinal, Nest, Voltage and even Sonic Pi and Bespoke to create branching sequences from chord progressions, and this is all done through MIDI. In normal DAWs, you can just pipe MIDI into and out of a device (including loopbacks), but when you do this in FL, it has a really hard time figuring out what they hell you’re trying to do, even when the inputs and outputs exist in the Patcher’s GUI or you already have a MIDI output lined up through a VST or otherwise. Mostly, it just doesn’t work at all, so I’m not sure why they even have the I/O in the GUI in the first place.
Sometimes it’s not even that complicated; even just a real-time note quantizer gets slapped on shit so I can experiment more. But FL doesn’t seem to have one of those, which kind of sucks
Maybe I need to make use of the MIDI output device, route it through something and pipe it back in? Seems convoluted as fuck, but I could probably just use that routing for creating stuff if it would work. I wish they would pay more attention to these things sometimes, but there’s really no perfect DAW.
Worse case is I have to use native controllers in patcher, but that might be an OK tradeoff for the new features 