fl studio rant 2026-01-28
this is adapted from a reply i left on a forum, not everything is verifiably entirely true, it’s just a raw dump of my thoughts at the time.
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the funny thing about FL that truly sets it apart from any other DAW is that it’s three parts that are only very loosely connected together in sometimes unintuitive ways.
and this is all down to where it came from and how it evolved. while almost every daw on the market started out as either an audio editor or a midi sequencer, FL’s beginnings was as a sampler step-sequencer, then it got software instruments that act similarly to those samples, effects channels that you can route those into individually that evolved into a full-blown mixer, basic song arrangement for those sequences that turned into a full-blown audio timeline-ish ordeal, and slowly grew over time to have odd facsimilies of what look like typical DAW features but actually function much differently. really an interesting case.
as for the software itself, though i don’t use it much as of late, and i don’t find myself recommending it to people anymore because it’s foreign to the way pretty much all other audio software works, i do find it quite cozy. especially with the custom colour themes they added in the new updates. the gui runs buttery smooth and the design language is quite nice.