Mark your calendar: in the year of our Lord 2025, FL Studio is the first “legacy” production software to arrive with a full Web version, complete with native FL plug-ins. Start projects in your browser, and complete them in FL desktop software. It’s an installation-free FL, and that’s a big deal.
We’ve come a long way. It wasn’t so long ago that Image Line publicly declared it would remain Windows-only and support Macs “when Hell freezes over.” (In a self-deprecating master class, they announced the Mac beta with “Hell froze over.”)
But this is something else: it’s the desktop FL experience, in your browser, including (as far as I know) on Linux and all processor architectures (ARM/x64). That seems a natural companion to FL Cloud, which is instantly accessed in the Web version. But Image Line also says they fully support all their native plug-ins.
And while this is still in an early beta, the promise is “full ecosystem compatibility.” Start with the Web, and you can open that project in your copy of FL and continue (with all your third-party plug-ins and other desktop features).
What’s that sound? Oh, it’s just half a dozen other DAW/production studio makers lamenting they got beat to being first. (Remember Reason announcing Rack Extensions ran on the Web? They missed an opportunity to build on that.) That’s not to say this is an easy engineering task; on the contrary, it looks like an epic amount of work. But it was time someone figured it out.
To me, this matters a lot more than hyped AI features. For new users, the installation alone can be a barrier to entry. If that sounds strange, try teaching in a classroom locked down by an IT department that seems to think they’re protecting you from using the lab computers. Try requesting a license and seeing how long you have to wait for a PO. Or even getting an admin password. I dearly hope Image-Line provides a free tier for access, as it’ll be a boon to teaching and collaboration, or even just settling arguments when clueless people insult FL as a “toy.” (It most certainly isn’t. I mean, they’re all toys — you “play” music. But yeah.)
Then, you have the issue of how to learn the software. Heck, even I sometimes forget how to do things in FL Studio, and I’ve been using DAWs for 35 years. Newcomers, or people coming from other environments, can be lost. Running in a browser means that the application and the documentation exist in a single interface. Learn it and like it? Then you can switch to the desktop experience.
So I agree with Image-Line CEO Constantin Koehncke that this removes a barrier to entry on those points alone.
It’s worth saying that FL already has the FL Cloud offering, which they say is accessible here. That means their sound content library now can have FL itself running in the same Web interface, for what-if scenarios with one-shots and loops. I think it’s also worth saying that this doesn’t replace the desktop software. It’s just a way to run the same interface in a browser for times when you can’t run an installer. And FL still has its lifetime license. I have no idea what their plan is for how to price or market this — we still have to test the tool first, and I’ll try to ask those questions.
There’s a waitlist for the public beta. You can sign up with your existing Image-Line account, if you have one. Nice URL:
Oh, and yeah, okay, they stopped calling it “Fruity Loops” something like 50 years ago. But when will we stop affectionately referring to it that way?
When Hell freezes over. Actually.