FruityLoops

FL Studio, formerly known as FruityLoops, is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Belgian company Image-Line Software. FL Studio was originally the creation of Didier Dambrin, who is now the lead programmer at Image-Line responsible for its core development.

FL Studio features a fully automatable workflow centered around a pattern-based music sequencer. The environment includes MIDI support and incorporates a number of features for the editing, mixing, recording, and mastering of audio. Completed songs or clips may be exported to Microsoft WAV, MP3, and the OGG Vorbis format using various high-quality sampling interpolation algorithms. FL Studio saves work in a proprietary *.flp format, inadvertently sharing the same extension as a filetype created by Adobe Flash.

The program is acclaimed for its professional DAW features at an attractive price point, its fully-functional demonstration versions, and its lifetime free update policy. Scoring to video is possible using the video-player plugin, but there is no support for traditional music notation.

Editions
FL Studio is marketed with multiple versions, each representing a feature set at a specific price point. Basic features of FL Studio are available in the Express Edition, the use of which is reduced to a simple drum-machine. The Fruity, Producer, and XXL editions further introduce more features, such as the ability to use the DAW itself as a VST plugin. The most complete edition, XXL, comes with many bundled effects and synthesizers which Image-Line normally sells separately as VST plugins. However, following version 9.0 of FL Studio, the XXL edition was discontinued in favour of the Signature edition. Complete comparisons of the various editions are provided at a link at the bottom of this article. Most of the editions of FL Studio also have a boxed sold online and stores of music retailers.

FL Studio is written in Borland Delphi a version of Pascal and thus there are no finalized plans to develop a native 64 Windows, Linux or Mac OS X port as there is no Mac version for Borland Delphi, aside from the non-Borland Delphi compilers OpenPascal, FreePascal, Virtual Pascal and GNU Pascal. As of September 2008, the Image-Line website indicates that the company supports users running FL Studio on Intel based Apple hardware via Boot Camp.

FL Studio 9 has been noted to work in Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard using WineBottler, a fork of Darwine, and in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, using the normal Wine, with ASIO support.

History of FruityLoops and FL Studio editions
In 1998, FruityLoops was launched. In 2001, it was updated with a new layout and was available in two editions - Pro and Full. In 2003, FruityLoops became FL Studio and was available in three editions - Express, Fruity and Producer. In 2004, a fourth edition called XXL was added alongside the existing three editions. In 2009, XXL was renamed to Signature Bundle.

Features
FL Studio processes audio using an internal 32-bit floating-point engine. It can support sampling rates up to 192 kHz using either WDM or ASIO enabled drivers. The audio engine in version 7 introduces limited multi-threading and multi-core support for some generators. The current retail version of FL Studio (9.0.3) added support for multi-threaded effects processing, with a noticeable performance increase.

The mixer interface allows for any number of channel configurations. This makes mixing in 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 surround sound possible, granted the output hardware interface has an equal number of outputs. The mixer permits audio-in, enabling FL Studio to act as a multi-track audio recording solution.

FL Studio comes with a variety plugins and generators (software synthesizers) written in the program’s own native plugin architecture. This API has a built in wrapper for full VST, VST2, DX, and ReWire compatibility.

An included plugin called Dashboard allows users to create full automation-enabled interfaces for their hardware MIDI devices. This allows FL Studio to control hardware from within the program. As of version 9.0 it also supports multiple controllers for different generators/effects.

FL Studio 8 Producer Edition includes a version of SynthMaker, the popular graphical programming environment for synthesizers. Support for the software is found in the extensive guides that are provided as HTML help documents. Users may also register for the official Image-Line forums, which are commonly recognized as a focal-point for the FL Studio community.

FL Studio also comes with a variety of sound effects, some of which include:


 * Chorus
 * Compression
 * Delay
 * Flanger
 * Phaser
 * Reverb
 * Equalization

Official website
 * FL Studio Tutorials
 * FL Studio Beat Making Tutorials

(This page is a clone of the one on wikipedia)