Good News for NI Plugs in FL Studio

I'm a big fan of the FL Studio DAW software, and also a big fan of NI plugins. In the past this has been a problem because of an incompatibility that caused CPU spikes in some NI plugins running in FL. Specifically, in Reaktor this manifested as a constant fluctuation of the CPU meter, even without an ensemble loaded. I've also noticed this behavior in Absynth. It's been possible to compensate by setting the plugins to run with fixed-size buffers, but that has two undesirable consequences; one, it increases the latency for those plugins, putting them slightly out of sync with other elements in the mix and two, it takes away the ability to use multiple outputs to separate mixer tracks in FL.

Well, the new 8.5 beta of FL solves all that! I was initially excited to read that the new beta lets plugins running with fixed size buffers use multiple outputs - but then I discovered a new audio setting called "align tick lengths" that makes those large fixed buffers unnecessary. The mouse-over hint for the align tick lengths checkbox tells us "may increase CPU performance" and they aren't kidding.



Chatting with head FL developer Gol over at the FL forums, it emerged that what this option does is to activate a teensy eensy weensy global fixed size buffer, so that everything is processed in 4 or 8 sample chunks rather than leaving a "remainder". That's negligible in terms of latency, and the fact that it's global means that everything stays on the same page, synchronization-wise.

This is fantastic, because now I can load up Kore in FL and Reaktor in Kore and get one of my favorite DAWs, my favorite control surface and my favorite plugins working together smoothly with no hitches, glitches or handicaps.

Licensed FL producer edition users can download the beta through their account page. Did I mention that there's lots of new goodies in it as well? Gross Beat, for one, appears to be part of the free update. The full list of additions and fixes is extensive.