FL Studio

FL Studio, formerly known as FruityLoops, is a digital audio workstation (DAW), developed by Belgian company Image-Line Software. FL Studio was originally the creation of Didier Dambrin, who is now the lead programmer responsible for the overall development.

About
FL Studio features a fully automatable workflow centered around a pattern-based music sequencer. The environment includes MIDI support and incorporates a number of features for the editing, mixing, and recording of audio. Completed songs or clips may be exported to Microsoft WAV, MP3, and the OGG Vorbis format. FL Studio saves work in a proprietary *.flp format, inadvertently sharing the same extension as a filetype created by Adobe Flash CS3.

The program is acclaimed for its professional DAW features at an attractive price point. Scoring to video is possible using the video-player plugin, but there is no support for traditional music notation.

FL Studio is written in Borland Delphi and thus there are no finalized plans to develop a native Linux or Mac OS X port. As of September 2008, the Image-Line website indicates that the company supports users running FL Studio on Intel based Apple hardware via Boot Camp.

FL-chan
Inspired by the success of Vocaloid2 with a character Miku Hatsune, Didier Dambrin made a comment in an Internet forum that he also wanted a moe character like Habanero-tan for FL Studio. A Japanese artist by the name Uruido took the request and created a moe anthropomorphism of FL Studio called FL-Chan, and she became the official character of the DAW software since the release of ver. 8 in March of 2008. Image-Line has adopted the character as a form of mascot, providing an array of purchasable merchandise and a dedicated page on the Image-Line website. You can find that here.

She has been featured in various Vocaloid videos, Meiko's Various Feelings being one.

She also can be given a voice, but no official voice bank has been made for her.

For the detail of the character and voicebank, visit UTAU wiki.

Usage
In the western Vocaloid (and also UTAU) scene, FL Studio is among one of the more popular DAWs used by some producers, it is not as widely used in Japan however since they also have access to other DAW systems as well. It is mainly used to put all the components of the music together. FL Studio also recognizes Vocaloid as a Rewire plugin, and is able to actively feed their voice samples together, making the software overall more attractive to Vocaloid users.

Since the software was designed for a wide varity of uses and aimed to appeal to users of all music levels, many amuteur muscians also use this software, and for the western Vocaloid fandom has proven to be popular because it allows even amuteurs a chance to remix or make new songs with ease. It has many tools that have abled to them to create work on level with more professional Vocaloid users and has been considered one of the more attractive software suites for purchase for this reason by newbie Vocaloid fans.

Some producers however prefer to prerender the voices from vocaloid into WAV files (which is also a necessary step for UTAU-based voicebanks) and insert it in FL Studio as an audio sample. Alternatively, a whole prerendered voice in a WAV file can be added as a sliced sample, for easy access to note segments and remixing.