Recording - February 2012 - 76

DAWS From Laptop

Reviews by Devon Brent and Mike Metlay

To Pocket

It’s a tough question. What does it mean to have a “mobile” version of a wellknown DAW for the PC or Mac? We took a look at GarageBand for iOS (which now works on the iPhone and iPod touch as well as the iPad) in our November 2011 issue; now we’ll look at the iOS products from two other well-respected DAW makers and see how they measure up.

Image-Line Software FL Studio Mobile and FL Studio Mobile HD
$19.99 and $24.99; www.flstudiomobile.com FL Studio (formerly Fruity Loops, hence the FL designation) has been around for the Windows-based PC platform since the late ’90s. Over the years, it’s blossomed into a full-featured DAW that competes quite well against the other ‘big boy’ sequencers in the industry. Image-Line has just introduced its iOS version of FL Studio, called FL Studio Mobile (“FLSM”). There’s the standard version for the iPhone/iPod Touch and FL Studio Mobile HD for the iPad; each version of the app is a separate purchase in the App Store. So how do they compare to their big brother on the PC? For this review, let’s find out how FLSM did on my iPad. FLSM is a multi-track audio production suite. It offers sampled instruments with its own sample playback player that cover a small variety of sounds, a multi-track sequencer with traditional recording and step sequencer/piano roll input, drum pad and piano keyboard input paradigms, and realtime effects processing. FLSM comes with 133 sampled-based “instruments” in four categories; Instruments, Synths, Drum Kits and Loops. The Instruments category includes pianos, organs, strings, guitars, basses, and more. The Synths category (mostly sampled from their PC VSTi instruments like Poizone, Toxic, etc.) includes leads, basses, pads and keys. The Drum Kits cover the more electronic variety like Electro, Club, Hip Hop and more. Finally, there is a small selection of sliced drum loops to choose from. Once you select an instrument, you can adjust the volume and panning in the stereo field as well as the attack and release times of the amplitude envelope. Unfortunately, if you were hoping for more tweakability like any type of modulation, it’s not possible for a given instrument. In the music-entry interface, there are two ‘modes’ available for real-time playing: Piano and Step, depending on the track type selected within the Tracks tab. Piano mode on the Keyboard tab offers the standard features one would expect from a good iDevice piano such as resizing, repositioning the octaves, and switching between one and two keyboard representations on the same screen (for a wider pitch range without having to scroll). Of particular note, the obvious lack of velocity sensitivity on the iDevice is handled by tracking where you play on the keys themselves; louder towards the bottom and softer towards the top of the key. That’s a nice way to overcome the obvious limitation besides using the accelerometer, like other iDevice music apps. Step mode, called Drum Pads in the tab menu, provides an adjustable amount of drum pads (think Akai MPC) from 1 to 32 pads, depending on the number of samples within the Instrument, and how you set it up. I only wish the velocity was handled as it is in Piano mode. The Track view is where you can do your mixing by setting the pan and volume of a track, mute and solo a track, and decide if you want to apply effects to the individual track. Double tapping on a track, depending on its track type,
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RECORDING FEBRUARY 2012

http://www.flstudiomobile.com

Recording - February 2012

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