FL Studio on iOS is one of the nicer, more full-featured production suites out there. And iOS users now get Universal support (so yo don’t have to buy iPhone and iPad apps separately), iPhone 5 display support, Audiobus input and output, multitrack recording, Dropbox import and export and enhanced zipped-up exports of whole projects, and waveform editing – wow.
But a bigger surprise is Android support. There’s not complete feature parity support yet, but that’s coming (and most of the functionality is there.) Generally, Image Line claims you can run on any 2.3 or later device.
http://www.image-line.com/documents/android.html
Given how many different kind of devices can fall under the label “Android,” just what do you get?
Well, any display screen will work, but they directly support “1280×800, 800×480, 960×640 and 480×320” – covering the most typical sizes.
And latency is really a matter of the capabilities of your individual device. Sonoma Wire Works were at Musikmesse (and NAMM) touting their own low-latency engine solution, but that would require adoption from OEMs. And generally speaking, OEMs haven’t adopted even Google’s own, limited low-latency solution (currently available only on Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, and Nexus 10, not even Google’s own recent Nexus 7).
My guess is that latency will still be a frustration. I’d recommend a multi-core device – FL Studio is specifically optimized for multi-core – and one of the resolutions above, plus a low-latency Nexus if you can find one. Otherwise, you should at least get what Image-Line calls their “battery-friendly” performance, and latency reasonable enough for working on production and arrangement if not live performance.
I still recommend iOS for this kind of work, but choice is good and healthy, so this is nice to see! I have a Samsung tablet, so I’ll test it on that. And on either platform, FL Studio Mobile is clearly an app to beat.
Don’t like any of this tablet/phone business? Well, FL Studio is coming to Windows touchscreens, too, as reported by Synthtopia. Watch: