Well as a fellow FLStudio user, I can tell you that you might be in for a whole new level of:
- Learning curve
- Frustration
- Workflow modification
I had a Ti2 for a while and could never get the USB integration working properly with FLS on Win7 64bit... the latency and timing issues were unbearable. It's almost as if Access has not worked hard enough on compatibility with this enormously popular host.
Also it is a bit of a myth that software doesn't sound as good as hardware. It's true that you are not going to get z3ta, vanguard or especially 3xosc to ever truly mimick the Virus.... you should look at a better category of softsynths like Dune, Zebra2 and Sylenth1 for making trance music.
Now, don't get me wrong.. there are certain types of sounds you can get out of the Virus that most of the synths cannot do or cannot do easily. There is something amazingly musical about tweaking knobs on hardware in real-time. Hardware can be so addictive that it can completely remove you from the actual process of making music. But, at the end of the day if you are making trance, the extra stuff the Virus can do is largely irrelevant to your genre of choice, and all of it can be achieved some other way (i.e. via plugins). And what a lot of people don't realize is that once you master your track through the DAW and compress down to MP3, any sound advantage that hardware has is really lost and you will not be able to tell the difference between hardware and software generated sounds (again, partially dependent on genre). I've heard some nice tracks that were produced with a Virus, only to find out that the sounds like leads and pads that really caught my attention were created by Sylenth or Zebra or something else.
I got rid of my Ti2 and went back to all software environment for workflow reasons. I might try a future iteration of Ti2 to see if they have made advancements with regard to total integration (like true USB 2.0 support). I also found polyphony on the Ti2 to be rediculously low compared to what my Core i7 processor can do with good soft synths. The out-of-box Virus patch for a Roland D50 FM synth bell type sound was eating up all available polyphony all by itself just playing a few chords. Not that I want any of my music to sound like a Roland D50 bell synth, but that should NOT be a DSP intensive, polyphony-robbing patch.
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