All of this blog has been tech stuff and more tech stuff. People must be wondering what is it I otherwise do. Actually as the story goes, earlier when I was working (, not on gaming but on my other programming job), my hobby used to be working on graphics stuff and modding other games and engines. Funny, my hobby became my job now that I am working on this game, so it was time to take up another one (, hobby that is). What’s the next best thing? Creating music, of course! 😀 It so happens I ran across this software called FL Studio 6 months or so back and started fiddling with it and was soon hooked.

I was using the demo for quite a while and I was really impressed by the whole product. I guess impressed enough to go get the full producer version of the software. For the clueless, FL Studio is a digital audio workstation (DAW), meaning you can produce music with it. OK, I am still a noob at the whole thing, but even then the software allowed me to create some really good tunes pretty easily. The work flow is not trivial, but you can figure your way around after reading tutorials and following online video-tutorials. I am not a good music composer, not by any stretch of the imagination, yet the software allowed me to create pretty decent tracks far too quickly than what I had ever thought possible.

The program has near infinite options for authoring audio, most of which I am completely clueless about. Unfortunately I haven’t got too much time right now to look at each and every one, but I hope I can get around to understanding them eventually. To someone who has never seen FL Studio, the interface might look intimidating. The amount of nuts and bolts on the UI makes one think that it would be rather difficult to get things working, however looks can be very deceiving. While not a walk in the park, a few searches on the internet will have even a total noob creating great audio loops in no time. All you really need to do is visit Youtube and there are more than enough tutorials for even advanced stuff. The FL Studio site itself has more than enough vids to get you started.

I kinda liked the software right from the word ‘Go’ and, yes, I am a sucker for music. Unfortunately all my earlier attempts to produce anything audible, with any other software (, or for that matter hardware) could only be categorized as ‘noise’. FL Studio just seemed so intuitive. True there are other, more powerful products in the market, but I think very few can stand up to FL Studio given the price point, not to mention the lifetime free upgrades the product offers. Cool!