I'm always looking at who among my favorite artists uses FL and sadly they're way too few, or some of them use it for basic stuff, loop making but then jump to ableton or others to continue. Some have used it and stopped and I can really understand why.
FL Studio is very feature oriented, lots to go around - but the core is still weak and thus can't be taken very seriously with high-grade Pros. Imageline keeping the PDC problems until recently shows how upside-down their priority list is.... this itself was a ridiculous thing to be honest...
The recent attention to audio recording has been long long overdue as well.
What's really missing from FL is organizational features for large and serious projects. The free-fromness of it now is great, but could benefit from some serious implementations to help users who want to keep things nice and neat. The recent addition of dragging and dropping a plugin to a playlist track and having all the automation tucked underneath took my attention.
This is a direction, I believe, FL should be taking very seriously if they want to keep serious people who are going pro. (I'm sure there are many here who use it professionally on a high-level certainly. Big up to you guys.)
I wanted to make a list in the To Do area but no offense to anyone, it seems everyone with a little idea and preference or shower thought is posting there. What I want to mention are basic core stuff that I hear a lot of people talking about. Maybe these can be looked at and we can finally have a comfortable, neat and easy to use on all levels DAW.
1. Playlist features:
There are loads of ideas running around to make the playlist neater. One huge task would be to have a very linear option (which most DAWs have for a reason), or some simple implementations like this would help:
If you can now drag and drop a plugin to a playlist track and have it's automation tucked in with it as well, how about in addition to that, we can also have an 'Link to Playlist track' feature on any plugin in the step sequencer as well. That would be really helpful and would help us keep some plugins 'locked to content' and dealt with in a linear manner. And if we want some others to be more free-form then we can
simple feature, win-win for everyone.However once the plugin is added to a mixer track, it's thrown and locked in the step-sequencer and you can work midi of that plugin ONLY so it wont add any more confusion as to which midi clip has what. But highlighting additional plugins and throwing them in the group will additionally add them to that midi group and we can also exclusively work the MIDI of those plugins only. We can have a little drop-box on the playlist track to chose which automation or MIDI info we're looking at. If we want to highlight the melody of ex: Harmless #1, the midi notes will appear on that MIDI clip normally and the MIDI notes of Harmless #2 and #3 will look a bit transparent behind it. Kind of like the ghost note feature in the piano roll.
Here's a basic idea of how some of this can work:
2. 'Layer' can be turned into sort of a drum-rack, like plugin in addition to how it works now.
This would work like a quick mini FPC. You select your drum sounds by highlighting them in the step sequencer, then 'set' them in layer. Then layer would list the names of those sounds as a list on the piano roll. Boom. A drum-kit made in just a few clicks. Anytime, any second you want.
3. Send to Group
Why can't I add any plugin to a group I've created previously? If i add another plugin and want to add it to the for ex 'Main Melody' group in the step sequencer I should be able to...
4. SEARCH FUNCTION:
When I type 'Clap' in the search bar of the browser, I should get a list of filenames with the name 'Clap'!!!! What is it with this current mode of searching? So outdated...
5. Shortcut to Create Automation Clip
Please!!!!!!
I'm sure there are more good ideas running around. The important thing is the development team should seriously start looking at core, workflow and organizational improvements. We're good with the available features as they are! Will take a long time to get bored with these!
Thanks for anyone who read and please let me know if there is something wrong with the logic of the workflow.
Best
Dany