Learning Studio from a programmer's perspective

Digging into Fl Studio more and more. I will just refer to it as studio. I have been a computer programmer for many years, so as I learn about studio, I do so in programming terms. For instance, looking into automation clips and generator 'knobs'. Once I got a handle on it, I remember it as the automation clip being an event publisher and the generator controls or knobs as subscribers. That describes the behavior and the one to many aspect of it.

Then I learned that studio generators do not listen to midi. Yet studio supports midi devices. I tried to imagine how that works. Its been some decades, but I think in the beginning FL Studio only supported its instruments and midi/vst support was added later. I theorized that there is something that does the midi type things in studio under the covers, and I called it PRES (Piano Roll Event Stream) in my mind. (If the developers here have their own name for it, I would love to hear about that.) It, and perhaps another protocol for automation, but in my mind its the same.

The playlist is the sequencer, of course, and I think of it as an event launcher. I think of midi in action as a lists of events with time offsets.

Then I started thinking about how the devs could take RRES and write midi interfaces. The VSTi wrapper takes PRES and emits midi for the vsts. The midi out takes PRES and emits midi that can be sent to external devices--this output can be sent to external devices or vsti. Native fl studio generators do not respond to midi, only PRES.

The automation clip is interesting to me, I imagine its events are stored in PRES, and it can emit both PRES or Midi CC.

Anyway, just sharing some thoughts. Its exciting fir me learning more about the product and discovering it has capabilities I was not aware of. The pattern/playlist/channel rack interaction feels different than how these things are presented with other DAW, and it took me some time to get my mind around that. I like it a lot, now that I understand how it works.

I like the user manual because it does explain things in a precise manner that works with the way I think. Thanks to all at image line--I have had studio since it was fruity and have added more licenses over the years--recently to all plugins edition. I love the free upgrade philosophy.

Interesting, I wrote the original product name which ends in loops, when referring to its earlier behavior and it got transformed into fl studio by the forum presentation program.