One thing is missing in FLStudio - Fruity Transient. FLStudio has no nasty inconveniences. Assistance of it's developers make users involved in creating this application. Therefore here's my idea. It is not easy to deduce how to make transient shaper, as inversed engineering is not easy. I know there's lots of transient shapers in VST format. But they all are slow and/or either all have poor controls range (too subtle smoothing) or bad sound quality. Most important is that they are not native for FLStudio. And I suppose the algorhythms used are often very complicated and goes around the line of the shoot, what effects in only few knobs to manipulate and slow action.
So many ideas stuck sounding bad because of too sharp transient. Softened transient is essential for creating pleasant high range and always sounds good there. It causes track is less shiny due to stopping high frequency partials to hit to hard. Transient is the luxury of digital sound processing. Mainly transient shaping is modifying frequency domain of amplitude of sound. It makes possible many tricks like softening hihat and crashes hits (low pass on envelope), adding punch for percussive sounds, restore punchiness lost on loudness wars (highshelf transient). It is kind of filter that works not on sound itself but only on it's amplitude. This view on the matter makes possible implementation of very fast transient shaper. Plugin can work as quick as Fruity Compressor or Parametric Equalizer. It can be even implemented inside mighty Maximus with two knobs: one for lowpass and other for highshelf gain (frequencies of envelope). It would be possible to create multiband version or even spectral version.
How does it work? Sound is put into envelope detector (with adjustable attack and release times), or other say level meter and to amplifier. Gain of the amplification is set and changed in time by inverted (1/x) envelope from envelope detector. The louder sound is, the higher the amplification is, to get constant amplitude of sound behind the amplifier. Same signal from envelope detector goes to parametric filter in general (low-pass filter with adjustable frequency and optionally to highshelf filter with adjustable frequency and gain). From there the amplidude signal goes to second amplifier that applies this modified gain to the signal processed by the previous amplifier. (Optionally one amplifier with multiplied gain can be used instead two amplifiers, which has no difference cause it is not amplifier but only digital multiplication). The output is soft, smooth and nice transient shaped signal. And how fast can it be!
Generally music sounds good with softening above 0,5kHz and bit of punch below (in multiband signal frequency domain). Transient shaping is not cumulative - few transient processors applied in serial acts as one with highest softening. Difference between transient and compression is that compressor works on level of amplitude and transient shaper works on amplitude regardless to it's level. It works on differentiated amplitude. Compressor smooths only sounds above certain level. Transient works same in whole dynamic range. Comressor is good for loud music, transient is good for dynamic music.