Published
Tue, Dec 2, 2014, 13:58
- The DAW formerly known as Fruity Loops will no longer be a PC-only affair as of sometime next year.
A Mac version of FL Studio is in the works.
The DAW is the descendent of Fruity Loops, notable in dance music for being the music creation tool fueling the early wave of dubstep productions. But while Apple computers have a history as the first choice for many creative applications, FL Studio had always been a PC-only affair, even as it's matured into its current form. Though there were plenty of workarounds—like the Boot Camp utility, which lets Mac users create a Windows-running partition, or, more recently, a "wrapped" beta version powered by Codeweavers CrossOver software—a fully-fledged Mac version of the next release, FL Studio 12, will be available sometime next year.
The company behind FL Studio, Image-Line, said in a statement posted to Attack Magazine that their software was written in such a way that it was difficult to break away from Windows before now. An Mac OSX compiler for Delphi, the programming language FL Studio was developed in, only recently appeared; before that, they would have had to port all of the code to another language. "We never thought that was a good idea," the statement reads, "and that's why we never did it before. But, things have changed, so let's call this progress." Much of the job now is switching over "operating system dependent calls" from the Windows API to Mac, which Image-Line cautions is quite time consuming.
Regarding the Windows version, Image-Line says the Mac project won't have any impact. "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."