Flexstyle

I actually own a 2i2 as well (use it as part of my MacBook rig) and I'd say they're on par with each other. Clean and plenty of gain. I'd take the Steinberg little boxes over the Focusrite ones right now just simply for build quality -- Steinberg's boxes are much more heavy-duty, although the Scarlett series is well worth the money too, no hate from me at all! Plus, I've found Steinberg's drivers much more stable under Windows than Focusrite, and haven't yet used the UR12 on my MacBook at all. I also own a Scarlett 18i20 plus an OctoPre for my big sessions but that's probably overkill.

On my main PC right now I'm rocking a little Steinberg UR12 interface. One mic input, one hi-Z line (instrument) input, fits exactly what you're describing for use case. Retails at $99. Super sturdy build quality, mic pre can even handle my Shure SM7B, so plenty of juice. Definitely would recommend. Mics: AT2020 is a decent entry-level mic, the 2035 might be even better for you as it's got -10db pad and low roll-off switches, and it only costs $150 at most retailers. I actually own a pair of the 2035s and got 'em brand new in sealed boxes on eBay for $100 apiece several years ago, so you could look around and see if such a deal is around elsewhere. You might also look at the MXL 990, which retails for under $100 but has a wealth of modifications available for it out there so you could potentially turn it into a beast of a mic. I plan on modding mine at some point in the hopefully not-too-distant future. I also noticed that Samson is selling the MTR201 combo package which includes a decent-looking large-diaphragm condenser, shock mount, pop filter, and a nice carrying case. No experience with that other than knowing that Samson usually hits a great balance of quality per dollar in the budget sector.

If you were used to Logic, I'd say give Cubase, Reaper, StudioOne, or MixCraft a shot. Those will probably all have a similar enough workflow that you'll be able to adjust reasonably quickly.

Patently untrue. Macs use the exact same kind of hardware as PCs these days. It's true that a MacBook Pro will usually trounce a laptop off the shelf at Costco or something, but that Costco laptop costs about half to a quarter of the price of the MacBook, and of course it uses inferior parts. Spend the same amount of money on a high-end PC as you do on an equivalent Mac and you'll get better bang for buck in terms of component quality and power--I've done this many times, and I'm sitting here on my super high end audio PC that cost at most half of what an equivalent Mac Pro would have cost. Now, Mac OS tends to handle audio drivers more nicely than Windows does, but not by enough to make a difference to most people. Macs are great, but they are not in any way superior to PCs by any quantifiable metric...aside from maybe resale value. Now, I also love my MacBook Pro, and the one thing that the Mac platform does have going for it that the PC platform doesn't is that there is a very small number of variations that can be made in Mac hardware as compared to PC, which means that most pro audio and video manufacturers only have to support a small number of combinations of hardware to go with their drivers or software. PCs don't have that luxury, and sometimes you have to get very finicky in order to build a rig that plays nice with all kinds of specialized hardware. I can see why someone would prefer to stay on the Mac side of things for that reason alone, but that does not make the Mac computers inherently any better. It just means that there's less room for error when other things are introduced to the equation.

The sound design possibilities of this library are way beyond what a standard "emulation" VSTi can accomplish, especially when you start combining systems, filters, effects, the mod matrix...super fun stuff! Plus, the 1000+ presets (a few of which I had the privilege of designing) means that this is an incredibly valuable resource straight out of the box. I can't recommend it highly enough, myself, now that I've used it.

FWIW, I know a whole lot of game composers and professional engineers who swear by Reaper. It's supposedly one of the single most customizable options out there, so it's as good as any a place to get comfortable with. Everything has its pros and cons -- I like doing my live recording sessions in Logic, but would rather do my sequencing and "song building" in FL Studio. Just get good at something, figure out what you like about it, and then try something else if you feel the need.

It's a bit pricier than the linked one up there, but this is likely a little more solid: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202197 4 GB of RAM will help it stay relevant for longer, too, as opposed to 2 GB. EDIT: To clarify, I love my 750Ti, but for raw gaming horsepower bang for buck, AMD is definitely the way to go. Generally, Nvidia = better driver stability, and AMD = raw power.

You'll likely want one of these as well: http://smile.amazon.com/Hosa-CMP153-Cable-Inch-Dual/dp/B000068O3C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460787873&sr=8-1&keywords=1%2F8%22+to+dual+1%2F4 This will take your signal from a 1/8" headphone jack (which is what it sounds like you have right now), and convert it into dual mono, suitable for use with a UR22 or 2i2. That Behringer interface you're showing has a fundamental problem, which is that you can't guarantee that the two inputs on it will be reasonably exactly the same level. One's a mic/line (the XLR with a hole in the middle), and the other is an instrument (the regular TRS-looking plug) input. The instrument input actually is at a different impedance than the other one, which is great if you're going to plug a guitar into it or something but not so good if you want a stereo recording with what you're doing. Like Neblix said, you'll just want to manually move the knobs until they're about the same. Or, if you're lucky, you'll be able to keep 'em all the way down, turn your Roland unit all the way up, and hopefully the gain is such that you don't even need to amplify it any extra. The reason you wouldn't just want to use the adapter you currently have (that takes 1/8" to 1/4") is that you'll be, best-case scenario, losing the right-hand channel if you just plug it into one input. Worst-case scenario you'll get some crazy phase issues, since that input will be expecting a balanced signal (the same thing on both channels, in a certain phase), and not a stereo signal. Here's a blurb I stole from http://www.portlandmusiccompany.com/balanced_unbalanced.php "A Balanced cable contains two identical wires, which are twisted together and then wrapped with a third conductor (foil or braid) that acts as a shield. The term "balanced" comes from of connecting each wire to identical impedances at source and load. This means that much of the electromagnetic interference will induce an equal noise voltage in each wire. Since the amplifier at the far end measures the difference in voltage between the two signal lines, noise that is identical on both wires is rejected. The noise received in the second, inverted line is applied against the first, upright signal, and cancels it out when the two signals are subtracted. This also prevents noise and ground issues in the signal and allows to run much longer cables without problems." Basically, the preamp is looking for something identical but phase-inverted, so plug a stereo signal into that at your own risk.

A Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 or Steinberg UR22 might be worth looking into. Those are a couple of home studio grade USB interfaces, complete with clean preamps and proper driver support. They'll set you back $150 apiece, but they're quite worth the expenditure. A little USB dongle is unlikely to include the necessary hardware for good, clean audio processing.

@ Anyone who reads this thread and wants to give advice: don't do it. It's a trap. This guy will not dialog, and will only keep asking more ridiculously open-ended questions.

Not this again....

those tom fills though.

Hey, welcome! You're good, this is exactly the right place to post. Neat video, too, thanks a ton for sharing! I see you've got this tagged as Eval -- generally, what that signifies is that you want a workshop staff member to come and give feedback on a mix that's been going through iterations here in the workshop, and it's not usually a tag applied to a thread with only one post. If you want some technical feedback on the song and the mix, you'll certainly get that! However, this does appear to be a released song already, so not sure if that's something you're still looking for. Obviously, if you were trying to get this posted on OCR, it'd have trouble on account of being strictly a medley, but I'm sure if you were looking for technical feedback on the mix 'n such, I and other would be happy to give that if you want it.

I got to give a lot of feedback on this as it was in process of being polished, and it's definitely one of my favorite Chimpazilla tracks for sure! I also tend to play this one out on occasion as well. Super proud of Kris for her rapid progress as a producer!

I was a bit skeptical when the song started out as almost an exact cover, but it progressed really nicely into a solid, well-performed, personalized version instead. Felt like it maybe relied a bit too much on the rhythm guitars and could have used a bit more lead work overall, but that's nitpicking. Production is super clean and I love it. Great work, guys. YES

Here. Here's a playlist of videos on synth design. Some of these synths come with FL Studio, some of them don't, so just find some of the videos that have synths that show up in the plugin picker in the FL demo. Watch and follow these videos and you'll get a handle on synth design. There are so many tutorials out there that you're really wasting your time asking questions on a forum instead of searching YouTube -- if you're serious about this music thing, put in the actual legwork!

Anything of mine is fair game, and I think a lot of it might actually be good for the workouts!

If it helps, I have an issue that's plagued me for a while, which slipped my mind until just now. Whenever I use more than one Steven Slate plugin in an FL project, it does spike and make FL behave similar to what you're describing. I solve this issue by not using more than one Steven Slate plugin in each FL project, and forgive it for now since they're (meaning Steven Slate) using a beta Windows client to make 'em work on PC. I'm just waiting for an update is all. Could be something similar with Sampletank or another plugin in your lineup, though--that's not out of the question.

To be very precise, you haven't said anything about whether or not the things we've been posting have been helping, or whether or not you've been following the advice given. The only thing you've been doing is insisting that there's a problem with FL Studio, which is a claim that is not corroborated by anyone else who owns the software here. If you've been investigating the things we've posted, you haven't acknowledged that fact, and we have no way of seeing what you're doing on your end besides what you post here. The people posting in this thread (all of whom have a long history of giving very good advice in this forum) have been giving you very sound advice, and you appear to have been ignoring it completely. Do whatever you like in whatever software you like, dude. It's your life. Just don't bother us anymore, please. This thread is no longer a productive one.

Judging by your reading comprehension in this thread and the quality of the tracks you've posted in the past, FL is not what's holding you back. Come back when you're willing to take advice from professionals--we'll still be here.

dude, calm down -- don't post three times in a row, give people time to respond!

I still think you need to look into 1) multithreaded processing (you haven't addressed whether or not you've tried that fix), and 2) a better drive for your large sample banks. If it's the latter, switching DAWs will not help. Maybe try the demo of another DAW and see what happens? The issues you're describing are just not matching up with my experience in FL Studio, though. Yes, of course I've had to deal with pops and such before, but I've never seen it ignore multiple cores. Something's gotta be up.

This is what my settings look like in FL right now. The big ones to pay attention to are probably "Multithreaded generator processing," "Multithreaded mixer processing," and Resampling quality. Bump it down to 6-point Hermite if needed, don't know if that's usually a default or not. You'll also benefit from getting a good external audio interface, as that will ease a bit of the load off your CPU for audio processing. Also, check and see what your animation settings are at. Lower them if needed, as that will free up unneeded CPU usage. Finally, unless you're using an SSD for your big samples, that's also probably a huge issue. Streaming stuff off a mechanical hard drive will bring even a supercomputer grinding to a halt, and it's generally better to run your DAW and your samples off separate drives. My C: drive is where I've installed FL Studio (and all my VST plugins), and it's a Samsung 840 SSD. That D: drive is a mechanical hard drive, so it only houses things like short samples (individual drums, breakbeats, etc.) and stems that don't get used often. The E: drive is where I've installed all my EWQL, Kontakt, Omnisphere, UVI, etc. libraries to. It's a Crucial MX200 SSD, and does a fine job keeping those libraries from being a bottleneck.

1. Which version of FL Studio are you using? 2. Is it pirated? 3. What are you using for your audio? (built-in, USB box, etc.) 4. What kind of CPU usage are you seeing? That's going to be a big killer right there. RAM isn't as much of an issue if you're hitting CPU bottleneck. 5. What is your actual CPU? A quad-core processor from five years ago is not going to be anywhere NEAR as efficient as a brand-new one. Clock speed doesn't matter, but CPU efficiency does. 6. You say you're using things like Sampletank, etc. Where are your samples located? Are they on the same drive as your DAW? What speed is that drive? That is also another huge potential bottleneck, and definitely WON'T be solved with another DAW. I'm running the latest version of FL Studio on a new computer with a current-gen 6-core i7 processor, 32 GB of RAM, and using SSDs to stream my Kontakt / EWQL / UVI / Spectrasonics libraries. Zero issues for me, even in a project using several instances of multi-instrument patches. It's incredibly unlikely that the issue actually lies with FL for you -- more likely a combination of your CPU and hard drive.

That case in the build pix above -- is that a Fractal Design R4? Looks awfully familiar.