FLStudio-Tutorials

This test was made to find the quality of FLStudio comparing to other 'pro' hosts like Cubase and Logic audio, and to see which areas the hosts were good and bad at, and to see exactly what areas the hosts can affect quality in.

Some people think that Cubase has a better render engine than others. Some people think that Logic audio has the best. The reality here is when exporting anything to a raw wav file, Logic / FLStudio / Cubase or any other VST host, won't differ in quality as long as you are using the same audio files, VSTis, and FX. Maybe the mp3 engine is better in one when exporting to mp3 than the other, but you can make your wave file to an mp3 in any program you want, therefore using any codec you want, so that dosn't really matter in the host.

We discovered that the only place a host can cause quality loss when you pitch shift using a sampler. Some hosts like FLStudio have a built in sampler, others have none but might also sell or include a bundled VSTi sampler. Most sequencers allow you to host a VSTi sampler, so you can choose which you want to use. But the reason its so important to choose a decent sampler is because each one has its own unique algorithm the coders made to do its pitch shifting. Some degree of distortion (aliasing) occurs when you pitch any sample up or down (e.g. in the piano roll).

(See: What is aliasing? if you don't know what it is).

When you render in FLStudio, it asks you which level of quality (Linear, 6 point hermite, Sinc depths 64, 128 and 256) you want to render your track at. - To be accurate, its actually asking you which level of quality you want the samplers to be rendered at. (bad = fast / good = slow)

Any sample that is played straight - as is - is not affected in any way by the sequencer. Its just mixing this sample in with the rest of the track. Its a simple mathematical process, adding the waveform to the other waveform, which just means in digital terms <number + another number>. This is not something that can really go wrong! or be affected by the host. (Apart from the way it handles clipping: some sequencers just let it digitally clip, some try to emulate analog clipping, some compress.. etc. But if you know what your doing, you shouldn't be letting anything clip in the first place!)

The only thing a sequencer does when it renders down everything is: Mix down all the audio clips. Render the VSTis down. Render any inbuilt samplers, then render on any FX / VSTs / DX's / RTAS etc (using their own algorithms)

So.. after seeing a site that tests a bunch of common software and hardware samplers and just seeing how bad some were, we decided to test FL's internal sampler, so we could compare. (The site had actually tested Fruityloops (v3), but FLStudio (v4) had recently came out, so we decided to see if there was a diffrence, which it turns out there was.)

Looking at the actuall quality of the sampler and how much distortion you get when you pitch shift anything is vital to the end quality of your tracks. Any distortion given off from the sampler will ofcourse end up in your mix, and if you have lots of sample melodies (pitch shifted samples) mixed together, your going to have a lot of distortion together with it if your not using a decent sampler.

The left channel, (shown not surprisingly in the left of each picture) uses a 1Khz sine test tone sampled at 44.1KHz.

The right, uses a 15Khz test tone sine sample sampled at 44.1KHz.

The sample was played from C4 to D6 on both the left and right. (Root note being C5.)

Click the pictures to open them in a popup full sized

1 - Here, it is rendered at linear quality, the same quality FruityLoops uses for real time rendering when you click play. As you can see, there is a large amount of aliasing on the right, great if you want to add lots of fx to your project, but not so good for quality until you render. Still, theres not even the slightest amount of aliasing on the sub 5khz. - (the left channel.)

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