14 DAY TRIAL // Those of you who’ve been using a Mac exclusively for the past decade may have missed out on a few PC-only programs that clearly deserve a great deal of attention.
For example, if you’re into mixing or producing music, even as a hobby, there’s a good chance you’ve ‘skipped a beat’ past FL Studio (also known as Fruity Loops), one of the best digital audio workstations out there. It's developed by Belgian software company Image-Line.
It features what I believe is the most intuitive and comprehensive step sequencer you’ll ever find in a music making app (and that’s just scratching the surface of FL Studio). The fact that it’s Windows-only has really bugged me for a long time now.
As the Belgian developer will agree, the Mac has gained quite some traction in the past few years, making it a platform that major software vendors can no longer ignore.
So I decided to knock on Image-Line’s door to ask “Why no Mac version already?”
Scott Fisher, their communications manager, led me to understand there’s a Mac version of FL Studio on the roadmap, but that there is no confirmation that the program is coming to OS X any time soon.
He wouldn’t provide any specifics about the roadblocks they're encountering, but he did say we should nonetheless have a chat on the topic. We’ll soon see what they have in mind.
What he was eager to tell me was that FL Studio Mobile is coming to the iPad very soon! The developer had already confirmed plans to bring their popular music app to iOS devices.
“We have submitted it and we are waiting for approval, all going well we should be launching toward the end of this month,” Fisher told me.
It will boast 130 high-quality instruments, 5 effects (reverb, delay, equalizer, amp, filter), a 99-track sequencer (as opposed to the 8-track sequencer in GarageBand), a piano roll editor, attack and release times per instrument, the ability to record manually played tracks, iTunes File Sharing support, and lots more.
No longer will you let inspiration pass when you're in bed at 1 a.m. with no mood to boot that clunky PC.
However, the app will allow you to export compositions to the desktop version, in order to give your tracks a pro-level touch.
Apple should have no problem approving FL Studio Mobile and you can expect an in-depth review from Softpedia as soon as we can get our hands on the .ipa file from Image-Line.
You can access a few demo videos of FL Studio Mobile over on YouTube (account required).
Note that FL Studio Mobile is coming to iPhone as well. This version will be even more simplified than the iPad version, but it will surely fill a gap for those who miss having GarageBand on their smaller iOS devices.