It's been a long time since I've been on the forums - but I just had a feature idea that I felt the need to bring up here.
I'm sure I'm not the only one with hundreds of .flp files - any sensible music producer likely does. And let's be honest, those file names are rarely very pretty... I have my share of "omg.flp", "thisisgood.flp", "coolsynthidea.flp", etc. that do nothing to tell me about what's inside, unless I load up the entire project. This makes going through old ideas very cumbersome (mine go back seven years now).
My idea: in an upcoming version of FL, enable a feature that renders either a quick snippet from the start of the playlist, the full playlist contents (or between song start/end markers, for those who use them), or some other sonically identifying component of the .flp, then package that into the .flp file and allow for quick audio previewing of .flp files in the Browser (just like audio samples).
Obviously, rendering can be intensive depending on a lot of different factors, although it could likely be sped up by doing a "quick and dirty" render at a low resample rate quality, to a low-size lossy file, etc. Ultimately, this feature would probably be best suited as a switchable option, for those who don't want to render every time they save a file.
What do you guys think? While it may not help me salvage my mysteriously named 2011-present project files, it would be a unique feature going forward.
TL;DR add the option to render a small audio preview, bundle it into the associated .flp file, and play back said audio preview from the Browser for easy sonic identification of ambiguously named project files
