Quote:
Originally Posted by fallward
Anyone know of any direct changes that will happen with FL Studio 12 that will affect the virus?
I'm pretty excited for the release but I have so many issues with FL Studio + Virus it makes production not as fun as it should be.
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In the entire time I used FLS, I never saw a strong commitment to make their product work with hardware. The core FLS product is largely developed by one guy, and with Imageline's business model of buy-once and get free upgrades forever, I'd say there's very little motivation for a sudden interest in spending a lot of time getting FLS working with the Virus specifically. In order to stay in business, they have to spend time developing features that will sell more copies or more plugins.
Did you ever get past your issue of the 2 second delay? I'm fairly certain that has more to do with a driver issue or your audio interface than FLS or the Virus. You may still have problems with FLS, but at worst they should be measurable in milliseconds.
Then, branch out and try another DAW so that you can contrast/compare to be issues are FL specific. On Access' music page, they list the Windows based "compatible sequencers" as :
•Steinberg Cubase SX/SL 4 or higher
•Pro Tools 8 M-Powered, LE or TDM or higher
•Cakewalk Sonar Producer X
•Ableton Live 8 or higher
So, if you stray outside the supported DAW list, you may always run into issues. At a bare minimum, you will probably never be able to get proper Virus support for FLS simply because Access will say it's not supported.
Just a heads up -- there are lot of people who learned about electronic music on FLStudio feel like other DAWs aren't "as much fun" to work with. Personally I think that feeling is overcome with time as you learn the new DAW, part of it is just overcoming learning curve.
My background started in hardware, actually long before FLS or even soft synths existed. In those days, MIDI timing between hardware instruments and the sequencer was just something we had to cope with. For a sequencing environment I started out with the now legendary Atari ST (a computer from the late 1980's which had built in MIDI ports directly on the motherboard).
So, when I first started using FLS, the "wow" factor for me was the super-tight timing of soft-synths, being able to open a project and have all of my patch edits for every synth instantly available in a project file without dumping them to individual synths, etc. All of the latency of signals traveling across MIDI cables seemed a thing of the past...
... or was it? At some point we run into CPU limitations, or we just lust after hardware because the gear is cool, or we want the immediacy of the hands-on feel of hardware.... My point is that more and more it seems that folks who cut their teeth on software feel there is something glamorous about eliminating a computer from their setup -- I guess it's hip to go old-school (I personally think its kind of a pointless goal, since the Virus itself is basically a computer, as are most other modern synths). For whatever reason, we find ourselves back with dealing with hardware and all of it's limitations.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that to some extent, you'll have to get used to workflow disruptions as a result of working with hardware. You will eventually develop your own way of doing things that optimizes your workflow. For example, I currently have several Cubase templates that I use to start projects -- they have lots of hardware configuration settings. Those templates alone took a long time to get set up the way I wanted to, but they save me a lot of time on an ongoing basis.
Another way to think about it is that you don't want your entire music hobby (or career) to be dependent on one DAW, especially not one like FLStudio that is dependent on a single guy to keep it going. What if Gol (Dieder Dambrin the developer of FLS) gets hit by a car one day, or just decides he has enough money and wants to retire?
So if you're serious about producing it kind of behooves you to expand your horizons a bit. It doesn't mean you have to drop FLS as your primary environment.
Just a side note, most of what I always appreciated about FLS workflow has now been replaced with Maschine. I liked that FLS kind of defaulted to a pattern-based step sequencer (it can certainly do a lot more but that was always its roots). Maschine supplants that need now. I use it for basic beat/groove construction and sampling in conjunction with Cubase as the primary DAW.