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Tutorial: FL Studio routed to Ableton Live WITHOUT Rewire
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| SgtFoo |
For those of you making a transition into live and want a nearly ideal solution for getting projects inside Live, for the sake of functionality and transferring sounds... I've managed to finally work multi-track outs from FL Studio into an Ableton Live Project.
You will be able to play a song within FL (VSTi version hosted by Live) and run it's (stereo) mixer tracks to a maximum of 15 Stereo inputs inside Live. For convenience I used a Drum Rack to gather the mix from FL so that FL's tracks aren't sprawled over a project's mixer. Note that you could also run things in mono if you have a good handle on manipulating audio routing within both programs ;) .
You will need::
-a stable version of FL Studio with the "FL STUDIO VSTi (multi)" installed (I have FL 8.0.2 at this time)
-a stable version of Ableton Live. (I have 7.0.3 at this time)
-a computer than can very comfortably run both of those programs.
-it would help to have a dual-screen or larger than normal screen for doing this since having both programs open at once makes it all easier, and they both require lots of screen space.
Here's the steps...
1. Start a New Ableton Live project
2. Create a Drum Rack and a Midi Track. Rename the Drum rack to "FL Mix".
3. Insert the FL Studio Multi-out VSTi into the Midi track. Rename it to "FL VSTi".
4. Insert an External Instrument plugin to 15 of the drum rack channels.
5. Inside all 15 drum rack channels, set the following
-- Midi To: FL VSTi & 1-FL Studio VSTi (Multi)
6. Inside each 15 drum rack channel, assign accordingly the "Audio From" to "FL 2L/FL 2R FL Studio VST (Multi)" for the first channel, "FL 3L/FL 3R FL Studio VST (Multi)" for the second channel, etc.
These are the individual mixer tracks.
7. Inside the FL VSTi plugin on that Midi track, assign FL's mixer outputs to FL2/3/4/5 and so on.
NOTE: note that steps 6 and 7 are linking the FL mixer outputs to the external instrument inputs on each drum rack channel. In essence, you are routing the mixers into each other.
8. Within Live, set the FL VSTi midi track's input to "no input". Set it's output to "Sends Only".
9. Within Live, set the FL Mix drum rack's input to "All ins" and "All Channels". Set it's output to Master.
10. At this point you can open or start a project inside the FL Studio VSTi, and press play. If you routed correctly, you will hear the assigned FL mixer channels through the drum rack channels in Live. If not, try the process again.
11. For taking control of the FL project's timeline, you must insert a midi clip in the "FL VSTi" midi track in Live. Insert a small one at first, and extend it as you listen to your FL project, until the end of it. Don't forget to set Ableton Live's BPM to match that of the FL Project, since FL VSTi will be slave to it.
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From here on, you should be able to grasp what kind of control you have. All the sounds from FL can be routed through the mixers this way, so as to retain the works you've made within FL Studio. Hence now you can run them through Ableton Live, so as to facilitate somewhat of a conversion into Ableton Live if you desire so.
A good example of this is taking the sound you don't like for a synth in FL, and getting a better one in Live. You can then enjoy the benefits you take from using Live, to manipulate that synth, while retaining all other work from the FL project.
Of course, another great addition to this process would be to export the midi from your FL projects and apply those notes to projects in Live.
While working on your FL projects within FL as a VSTi, you may want to save the FL project as a different version, since the mixer routing isn't conducive to standalone FL Studio anymore.
I chose not to use rewire, since I'm not really a Reason fan, and don't want to have another software stage in between the 2 programs.
Note that it is advised to have lots of RAM for this to work. I have 8GB at the time of writing this, and noticed that I'm using the equivalent of having both hosts open to run this. In Vista x64 Ultimate, I'm currently using 3.4GB of RAM. Lots of CPU power couldn't hurt either ;)
Hope this comes in handy for those who haven't the audio engineering side to work with. |
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| glsmaster |
| Well I really need to check this out ASAP. |
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| SgtFoo |
| If anyone else tries this, I'd like to know the outcome. |
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| Lucidity |
| It works fine with vst version. I have done this also through fx teleport and it worked to a point. Only problem through the lan though was that when the audio stopped sending from fl, it would stop the whole project. So I would have to send a sound and mute it in Live. But, vst version of Fl is very handy and multi channel config works nicely too. |
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| Microlab |
| I find it way problematic, prefer the old process. |
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| Knowland |
| Do you know if Live is multicore capable and if you were to load two FL VSTi would they each use a seperate core? I use quad core so this is important |
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| SgtFoo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Knowland
Do you know if Live is multicore capable and if you were to load two FL VSTi would they each use a seperate core? I use quad core so this is important |
You can't think of it that way. Ableton doesn't choose CPU affinity based on the number of VSTs. Your OS will do more of that decision-making. FL and Ableton are multi-CPU capable, when enabled in the options; this makes Ableton/FL find the multiple cores and try to span off operations to the cores, but ultimately, the operating system makes the final call on which cores get what code. |
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