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getting the most out of fl studio
Getting the most out of fruity loops
Ok so you got a low-end pc and you still want to produce. I wrote semi-decent music on a Pentium 2 (233mhz) Pc for about 8 months. First of all to give yourself some speed set your soundcard buffer to max. To do this go to options menu and select audio settings and drag the direct sound properties bar all the way to the right. Also click the general tab in settings and unselect ultrasmooth visual feedback.
Ok now onto effects. In the mixer every time you put in a few effects go to the upper left corner of the mixer and left-click the small box and a menu should come up with an option to "switch smart disable for all”. This shuts off the effects when there is no sound coming from the channel they are in. This can be the most drastic step for reclaiming lost speed. (This will not affect anything in your song and in my opinion should be done automatically by the program.)
Now if you are using a lot of synths things can get complicated but you do not need to sacrifice your need for another just because the CPU meter is reading 100 and your song sounds like it has been timestretched without your permission. You can always render unglitched right.
Now what I do in this situation is I render a part of my song like a half measure or maybe 16 bars depending on if I'm writing a melody or percussion. First turn off all master effects (hit the green "led lights" in the master channel of the mixer that have effects in them) Select the part that needs the new synth with the highlighting tool in the playlist and go to the file menu and select export then export wav. Select your Wav samples folder and click ok. When the rendering box comes up switch the looping mode to wrap remainder. Hit start. Now if you did this correctly you just looped a section of your song. (Remember to reset the looping mode to leave or cut remainder when rendering your whole song.
Now go to the end of your song and right click one of the instrument channels in the step sequencer and select insert channel and select audio clip. Now right click the channel that says audio clip and load sample. Load that loop you rendered earlier of your song. The bottom half of the playlist is for audio clips. Set yours down there where there is nothing above it in the top half of the playlist. Now you may turn back on the master effects. Now if you did everything I said above, this place you set your loop should use up virtually zero CPU. So all the effects you placed on instruments in that loop aren't running at all. Insert the new synth and write in a new pattern with a fresh funky synth above the loop. After you are finished delete the loop and put back in the patterns for the instruments used to make the loop. Oh yeah and by the way audio clips tend to be louder than the samplers so turn down your synth a little bit after you get it written. (Also there is a tab in the step sequencer in the lower left that switches between audio clips and synths/samplers.)
********Note fruity synths like sim synth and sytrus don't work with the next technique**********
Ok now you are doing everything I said and still your pc is running slow. If you have synths sitting in the step sequencer they take up juice whether they are in use or not. I know a way to make them go away temporarily if they are done being used in the particular part you are writing in. What you do is you go to the the little plug icon in the upper left corner of the gui (the visual form the synth takes) and left click it and go to "save preset as" this saves the setting so you can use it again meaning all the knobs and stuff will be right where you left them. I would name it something you can remember and include the name of the synth. Just name it and save it, don't move it to a new folder. Now select the folder icon in the upper left of the GUI and select "fruity balance”. You will get an error message saying, "can't load an effect into a channel" so the program loads nothing into that channel but your patterns stay there. The synth is now using zero (or close enough to zero) CPU. Write the rest of your song. Now when you are getting ready to render the song select the folder icon that you selected earlier and select the synth you were using from the list. Go to the plug icon on the GUI and select presets and the preset you made should be at the end of the list. I would recommend practicing this before you try it in a song so you can get used to the technique.
I wrote this to encourage those who cannot afford a good computer to continue producing regardless. I do not mind this FAQ being posted on any site as long as my name is on it my name meaning outer limit. You may edit it but you must put down that I wrote it and you edited it ok. Don't bother me with permissions but thank you's are always nice to find in my email.
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