Hands up who remembers when it was called Fruity Loops? The software of choice for many grime and later dubstep producers the DAW now known as FL Studio was behind some of both genres most notable tracks. Somewhat bizarrely for a creative tool, it was never available for use on a Mac and strictly for PC. Until now. Yes, all you Apple fans out there will now be able to harvest the sounds of the latest edition of DAW with FL Studio 12 being fully Mac compatible.
The news was first revealed by the company in a statement issued to Attack Magazine which revealed why the move to OS has taken so long, it’s plans for the future and how PC users will be unaffected by this development reading:
“We started by testing a FL Studio Mac OS X BETA (Crossover Wrapped) version with direct installation on Mac OS X. But this is still a Windows program, running on OS X. The interest in the wrapped beta, and the problems we faced supporting 3rd party VST plugins in it, lead the team to start work on native OS X VST versions of Edison, Gross Beat, Harmless, Harmor, Maximus, Ogun, Slicex, Sytrus, Vocodex. See how to get these plugins here.
The VST plugin testing, was in fact, the start of the FL Studio native OS X compatibility development. The VST plugins use the same code-base as FL Studio itself and if we could get these working to spec on OS X, then FL Studio would likely follow soon after.
Well, the plugin testing is progressing nicely, and so the team has turned their attention to FL Studio 12 itself. It’s a long and slow process and we can’t make any promises, since we may come across unexpected and or unsolvable technical problems. But work is indeed under way. Below are some of the issues we face porting FL Studio to native Mac OS X and explains why this is taking ‘so long’:
Will this impact on the development of FL Studio for Windows?
No, the team working on the conversion to OS X is completely separate from the Windows development team. They talk, but don’t share any bodies that we know of, so it’s business as usual on the Microsoft side of things. Bill Gates sends his regards BTW.
The FL studio Support Team”