Requests: Revised Project Audio Sorting (File Management) and More

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Dépaix
Thu Dec 02, 2021 1:41 pm

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Requests: Revised Project Audio Sorting (File Management) and More

Hello,


After having used FL Studio for about a decade and in recent years having to use Pro Tools, some obvious benefits but also flaws of FL Studio showed.

I would love FL to be the only solution for all purposes but for this some things I think need addressing which I have not seen anywhere:

  • The most pressing, I feel, is the following: it would be great if FL Studio had a similar file structure to Pro Tools. By this I mean that whenever starting and recording a project in Pro Tools, a whole subfolder is made which contains all essential files to the project. This way, it is much less of a hassle to move around project stems without running into "error missing file" pop-ups. This subfolder would then contain a standard amount of folders, among which "Recorded," as well as the usual .flp file. The possibility of zipping files just doesn't match the ease with which a folder can be moved as a closed partition.

    An extension of this is that, thus far, all recorded audio elements—of all projects—end up lumped together in one directory like "C:\Users\Documents\Image-Line\FL Studio\Audio\Recorded." Even if this is a customizable directory, it would (I think) prove much more convenient if the specific recorded files of one project are contained within its own project-subdirectory folder which can be independently moved around, anywhere on the disk, without it corrupting the link to the source files (stems). In other words, in this scenario you could move around a whole project folder, from anywhere, to anywhere, press the .flp file, and receive an errorless experience of opening the project.
This file management feature is by far the most important point of this post, but here follow some additional ones:

  • Since I have specifically done a lot of mixing over the years in FL, I would love it if its UI became somewhat adjustable on this front (and I think this could perhaps turn FL into becoming a widely recognized and accepted "industry standard" DAW outside the realm of EDM). As a mixing engineer, one thing I really missed coming back to FL was the fact that there is no option to automatically link playlist tracks to mixer tracks, or how the playlist tracks do not correspond very intimately with the mixer tracks. When I want to cut out a specific part of an audio clip for mixing, let's say guitar.wav because it needs slightly altered signal processing, it would be very convenient if I could auto-assign all or a selection of tracks to certain mixer tracks, so that I can simply move this down a track and do my different processing from there without having to do any re-assigning myself. Consequently, renaming either the mixer track or the playlist track to guitar intro would change also the name of the other. An even greater feature would then be the ability to do some mixer track features within the playlist track, like link it to an Aux right away (so that I can send my guitar clip to the same eventual grouped mix bus).
  • Another really cool thing which FL (to the best of my knowledge) does not have is VCA faders that control a group of faders all together, but itself processes no actual signal. A handy mixing tool.
  • A final suggestion is to have an enable switch for pre-loading plugins at startup, so that project load times decrease. The feature to turn this off (to the way FL is designed now) would then be very nice for flexibility.

That about sums it up. I think the convenience, smoothness, and flexibility of FL Studio is far too great to ever give up on it. But it would be nice if it could absorb the great features of other DAWs, features which make it a little more versitile for things like live-recording and heavy mixing.


Good day everyone.

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