Have you tried Patcher? That was pretty much a game-changer for me; the normal interface was a bit too simplistic and restrictive, and Patcher sort of lets me do everything visually. I feel like a lot of people who don’t like the usual interface would benefit from it, but for some reason not a lot of people try it in the first place
Thought I’d fork this here in an effort to not clog up the Ableton fanboy thread 
This is really interesting to me because I always feel like their documentation is incredible, and probably one of the main reasons why I got so deep into FL. I’m curious as to which pages you found to be the most difficult to go through, or if maybe they’ve just stepped up their game in that department over the past few years. I think I started using FL in 2024, so that might have something to do with it – but they really seem like they’ve gone above and beyond lately.
Also, it’s weird to say, but their AI is probably the only good AI I’ve ever used, since it’s explicitly trained on meaningful data from the manuals and APIs
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For me, the issue I go back to over and over again was figuring out how to do GOOD swing. I was told to stay away from the project wide swing control because it really only throws every other step slightly off grid, and it affects ALL patterns equally, so you can’t have it affect just the drums.
Now, it turns out there’s a relatively painless workaround for this, but it took me two years to find in a youtube video with about 2000 lifetime views and a google drive link to some groove templates that were thankfully not taken down after about 10 years. That shouldn’t be how I’m figuring out per-pattern swing, but it is in FL.
And the knowledge to do the things I want to do seems to be all over the place like that - sometimes it’s in the forums, sometimes the manual, sometimes on some unaffiliated YT channel. I get that is going to be the case with any software, but it feels to me like this is more the case with FL studio.
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I’m really surprised at how empty their forums are most of the time. I know it has the potential to muddy the waters, but they should really consider allowing the pirates to post there, too (I’m pretty sure that’s the majority of their users, whether they want to admit it or not), or maybe hiring a few knowledgeable people to seed the whole “let’s learn this together” spirit. Especially people who have been using it for their entire lives, but might not have paid for it.
From what I can tell, most of the features I use are relatively recent constructs, so I guess if those weren’t so robustly documented, nobody would ever know how they work, and I certainly wouldn’t have even bought any edition at all to begin with. The more foundational features are probably likely to slip through the cracks a little (or in their case, quite a lot), and that might directly coincide with the majority of the features I’ve decided I’m never fucking with, including design choices that I hated from the beginning.
We’re actually at a weird point where it might be easier to just script new features than to use their scheme, since the API documentation is so incredible and their regular workflow is so dated. Non-colliding clips, coming right up!
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I think there’s actually a template for this now, I use it to record my synths and I don’t have too many problems. IIRC you just take your audio interface inputs and assign them to mixer channels, which then correlate to playlist channels that automatically turn into audio tracks for this. I stay the fuck away from Edison as much as I can because I’ve never understood how that works.
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Holy shit, I just figured out the Gross Beat dilemma. Presets are only not showing up inside of Patcher, which is why only a few people seem to be noticing. If you route out to separate tracks, you can technically still use it, but you can’t use it in tandem without stupid routing bullshit.
(I might consider getting familiar with that end of things just because it’s the only option, but not being able to trace a wire back to the source seems like it’s going to get annoying real fast)
$99 for the full version is still steep, even if somehow re-saving presets would do anything. Might as well wait to upgrade the whole thing with those prices 
For $20, you get pretty much the same software from Melda:
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Glad they keep insisting on spending their time and resources on entirely unnecessary things such as this instead of working on implementing MPE or even updating their 200 year old synths 
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Yeah, I don’t get the idea, appeal, or how it’d work in practice. Does it read and process audio locally or do you have to upload samples to work with? What sort of processing limitations are there? Does this get around the need for an interface/ASIO/latency issues because it’s cloud based? Are online DAWs really popular nowadays and I just don’t know about them?
In my head this feels like GarageBand - a cool entry point into audio but almost absurdly limited compared to a real DAW, but I really have no idea. I’m curious how much firepower you get with a browser-based DAW and if you can make a legit track with one (but not enough to actually try it out). Surely they did bunch of market research and figured out this was how you capture an audience or something. Maybe this is a “if we give them easy access they won’t just pirate it” thing, but certainly the endgame is to have people buy one of the pricier packages, so it’s got to be crippled in some way?
But I’m old and crusty and set in my ways - been making music on a computer for so long I don’t think I can get my head around how or why I’d use an online DAW, and thus probably not the target audience.
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I would assume that the end goal is selling as many subscriptions to FL Cloud as possible and people to pay for mastering services and/or whatever stuff they offer that is online only.
Every tech company is moving towards a shitty subscription model, because, of course, it makes them maximum profit and who cares that the customer doesn’t own anything else than a license/access to stuff that may disappear anytime and/or when they stop paying every month…
To give you an example, I currently work as a Consultant, since getting a F/T job is apparently impossible. I have MS Office 2021 on my work laptop. I’m using a Proton Mail business account that is setup to show in Outlook. Every time I get a meeting invite and click it, fucking Microsoft tries to open the .ics file with Outlook 365, asking me to “log into my Microsoft account”. To avoid that, I have to save the file, right click it and choose “Outlook (classic) every.single.time I want to open the file, and answer “yes” so it shows in my Outlook calendar because even if I allowed that option by default, it is ignored.
I just read that Outlook will not even work anymore with IMAP/POP servers from April 2026 on, which means that this will be the end of my Outlook use, despite having paid for the “lifetime” license. And of course, MS is also trying to “sync” your shit in the cloud constantly, so you have to buy a subscription with more storage…
File under “the enshittifcation of everything”.
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I can’t argue that the business of tech is a complete shitshow. Part of my job for the last decade+ has been arguing against/implementing/working around the dumbfuck ‘everything in the cloud’ model, so I’ve had a front row seat to the stupid. I will wholeheartedly agree that software has gotten worse in that time and that the explosion of web apps has screwed up the landscape badly.
What I might take issue with is equating Outlook and FL. Email is an inherently online thing, takes basically zero resources to process and benefits from online storage. As shitty as the apps themselves are nowadays and having to have an online MS account to do anything is dumb, it’s generally a problem that gains some benefits from an online solution. A DAW is literally the opposite in every measure, and so it makes no sense to me that when you want to bring the full hardware to bear on a problem, when you have a multi-TB external drive full of samples, when you have a ton of third-party plugins, why go online? What functional benefit is there?
I think the real question is whether professionals/power users are going to go for it. My suspicion is ‘absolutely fucking no’, which means IL is stuck maintaining parity between an online and offline version, or having the online version be a pale imitation which means they’ll serve two different audiences. I just don’t see how they could engineer this to be as immediate and full featured as an installed, local program, and so I’m figuring it’s more of a teaser or a playground than a serious replacement for their core offering, because I think the people that keep the lights on aren’t going to be using the online version.
But after all that, what really doesn’t make sense to me is IL playing Evil Empire. Yeah, the world is a fucking toilet these days, but they always had a really awesome business model compared to almost every other audio company. Tossing that community goodwill to extract a bunch of fast cash from monthly subs just doesn’t seem like them. Not saying they aren’t or won’t, just that it’s really opposite of how I viewed them.
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I’m also hoping they don’t forget what set them apart from the beginning. Time will tell…
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I’m in idaho on a work laptop right now, and the thought that I could login and start a project at least with the stock FL plugins and then sync that into my full DAW when I get home (if the inspiration strikes) is pretty appealing. I’d guess ditto for touring musicians.
And who knows, maybe this means they’re working on some sort of low latency netcode to make remote collaboration easier with other users of FL or something. IDK.
Yeah, I wish they’d get MPE dealt with more, but I don’t think this is the dumbest thing they’ve done recently (I dislike the stuff like FLEX a lot more).
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Yeah, this is pretty weird, even for them. I have a running list of likely easy fixes that could really make some people happy, but obviously if they don’t hook newcomers, the lifetime subscription money runs out pretty fast. It’s a great model until they have to gamify the experience for the masses or whatever they’re planning on doing next. Hopefully not achievements 
Browser-based JS shit just sucks all around, in my experience. I definitely use Photopea for all of my artwork formatting needs, for example, but I really wish they’d just make a goddamn app. No matter what utility I’m using in the browser, it’s bound to irreversibly fuck up 200 steps in to the point where I can’t even save shit anymore; that sounds real good on the DAW front 
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We also already have mobile, too, which is just $15. If someone really wants to write music on the go, it integrates perfectly into the DAW later, works great with MIDI controllers and pretty much everything else. While I’m not normally a fan of anything mobile, their app crushes most as it is, which kind of makes browser-based bullshit less appealing than it already was.
Image Line is still on my ‘nice’ list, for sure, but I hope those small (but crucial) patches keep coming. The granulizer-in-patcher one was a home run, as well as VFX Script (I keep forgetting how new that actually is, since I’m not a long-time user) and I think they’ve got a few QOL shit still in them. If they’re willing to do it.
I’m also still patiently awaiting the second coming of Flowstone. Just me? Allllrighty then
When going to an audio engineer I just realised how many bad habits FL Studio formed in me, multiple instruments on the same track, unorganised channels and unorganised plugins. Moving to Ableton didn’t only make producing easier, but more tidy for me. I think there are ways to remain neat and tidy with organisation in FL Studio, but the whole DAW seems to reward or encourage you not to do so.
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