Leaderboard

Haven't used FL in awhile. Used FL for prob 3-4 years in the past. Used S1 for over 2 1/2 years now. There is no advantage Live or Bitwig have when it comes to features that make it easier to make repeat pattern music. S1 has the features to work fast in repeat pattern music the features just come in different flavors. Now if you are performing live that is a different story. IMO S1's piano roll strengths: 1. Ghost notes and ability to edit/view any channels you want on the fly. S1 does this better than anyone else. 2. Custom Macros. Haven't gotten into this yet. But there is some pretty cool stuff. 3. Basic editing and selecting can be about 90% the same. In the piano sroll elect the Pencil as your default tool. Then hold Command on a Mac (option on Windows?) to switch to the pointer tool. 4. Groove quantize. Easily rip grooves from any source and apply them at will. 5. Lock piano roll to specific scale. This is really nice when working in a specific scale. You do not have to worry about entering in the wrong note and just get on with music making. 6. Duplicate Shared (shift D) Duplicate clips that share the same information. Open any of these clips and make your edits. These edits will then automatically be made across all of the duplicate shared clips. This is similar to FL's old block style patterns and an essential tool for repeat pattern music.

I've been using S1 for a while as a backup DAW. For the way I work it has a long way to go before it can compete with Cubase, but it's getting there. The MIDI editing in S1 is pretty good too, but once you really get to know the Cubase MIDI workflow nothing else comes close. And as far as MIDI routing/sends and MIDI insert effects I don't think anything will ever top Cubase. When it comes to piano rolls though you are going to learn to write music based on the workflow of the DAW that you started on. What I mean is, the nature in which you enter notes and edit notes will evolve differently. I learned on Cakewalk and Cubase, which is tool-based, which is the best way for me to work. FL feels very clunky to me because I like to enter notes first and then go back and edit if I feel like it, so much clicking to do that. Also Cubase is very much a two handed DAW, uses mouse+keyboard to do very powerful things very easily, I feel like S1 is trying to be somewhere in the middle with that (like the middle ground between Cubase and Reaper). For my tastes I think it needs to pick a side and focus on that before it can be something I would consider switching to.

I don't know, man, watching people struggle to use their own DAW is not a good indicator of how the DAW works best. I find Studio One's MIDI editing superior to FL's in almost every way. MIDI automation and such is much easier, since it's natively supported and doesn't require you to constantly search for parameters and create new clips. The only way it isn't is that the piano roll still has separate tools for pencil and erase; however, you can rebind these however you want (especially with the Nostromo I gave you), and just like FL, you can hold control for select. While you can't get it to behave exactly like FL... I use both DAW interchangeably and don't have an issue adjusting. Getting used to the different mouse tools is the basic entry challenge to any DAW really; but for what it's worth, as a long time FL user, I got used to it pretty quickly. The piano roll started working for me a lot more because ghost notes aren't bound to isolated patterns, they're bound to all tracks in the song. Furthermore, you can select on the side the tracks to view and edit in the piano roll. That means I can edit my violins while viewing my violas, cellos, and double bass. Or if I want, enable them all for simultaneous editing. Or turn everything off and view a part in isolation (which is the default if you go to edit a MIDI clip). Or turn on the whole orchestra for simultaneous editing, or view the whole orchestra as ghost notes while editing all the strings simultaneously, etc. It's just like composing using different note colors in FL, except it's all managed for you and everything is still stored in separate tracks. This offers the power to bring the entire song into one piano roll while still leaving everything separately organized in tracks in the arrangement view, something I think FL should take notes on. I mean, I can't promise you that you'll love it the minute you load it up, but if you give it some time, I think you'd appreciate how down to earth it is compared to other DAW's. (The same way FL is) The mixer is also a standard DAW mixer, so FL still wins in that department. For electronic stuff, I'm not sure it would cut it for you and your fancy processing methods. I'd recommend Live, maybe, or Bitwig. Also, Studio One 32bit can only load 32bit plugins, and 64bit can only load 64bit plugins. That's probably a dealbreaker for you.

There is a ghostly possibility that i'll update my track... I hope i get in time

It's so long ago it's hard to say but i ALWAYS point to this mix : http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00690