Installing plugins |
General
FL Studio plugins have to be installed in subfolders of the FL Studio\Plugins\Fruity
folder. Effect plugins have to be placed in the Effects subfolder, generators
have to go into the Generators subfolder.
Plugins must be placed within their own subfolder of either the Effects or Generators
folder. This folder has to have the same name as the plugin dll. For example,
a gain plugin file with the name Wawza.dll would be placed inside the Plugins\Fruity\Effects\Wawza
folder.
Installer
The FruityPlug sdk includes an installer tool. In the bin folder, you can find
the FPSetup.exe file. This is meant to be called from the program you use to
unarchive (unzip, unrar or whatever) your plugin files. For example, it's possible
to configure the WinZip self extracting archives to run a program when the extraction
is complete. Alternatively, you could include FPSetup.exe in a zip file and
tell the user to run it (although the first option is nicer to the user).
FPSetup takes some effort out of the hands of the plugin developer (you) because
it looks for the folder where FL Studio is installed. Take care : FPSetup is
designed to work with FruityLoops 3 and FL Studio 4.x and higher, not with any
2.x version. It won't find the FL Studio folder for any 2.x version of FL Studio.
The files to be installed have to be put in a folder inside the folder where
FPSetup.exe is located. So, for a plugin with name Wawza.dll, you would have
a folder with the name Wawza inside your archive.
Optionally, you can include presets to be installed by FPSetup. These have to
be put in a subfolder called Presets (so Wawza\Presets for the Wawza.dll example).
You can also have files copied into a location relative to the base FL Studio
folder. To do this, put those files in a subfolder called Fruityloops (so Wawza\Fruityloops
for the Wawza.dll example).
We do advise using a proper installer for plugins. The free NSIS
program works very well and can be extended to do just about anything very easily.
The script
FPSetup requires a script file to know what it has to do.
If no parameter is provided on the commandline, it assumes the script file is
called "fpsetup.scr". You can also instruct it to use an other file
by calling FPSetup like this : "fpsetup -f scriptfile.scr" (without
the " characters).
The content of the scriptfile is very simple. You can look at the fruitymonitor.scr
file in the tools folder for an example.
There are two lines that are required in a script file :
PluginName = Dll Name Type = Plugin Type |
Make sure there is at least one space at each side of the = character.
Type can be either Effect or Generator. This tells FPSetup whether it
has to install the plugin in Plugins\Fruity\Effects or Plugins\Fruity\Generators.
PluginName has to be the name of the plugin dll, without the .dll extension.
There can also be comments in the file. Everything on a line after a double
slash ( // ) or a single quote ( ' ) is considered a comment.
Examples
PluginName = Wawza Type = Effect |
PluginName = Wohow |