What is Reddit's opinion of FlowStone?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

It's a can of worms if you don't have much coding experience. It's a hobby for me.

Flowstone makes it easy to try stuff out quickly and make a usable interface, but you really need some coding knowledge to do much with it.

Also, Reaper lets you make those JS plugins. It's a little limited, but it's really cool if you need a simple but specific tool on the fly. For instance, I made a 3-way equal power / equal gain stereo crossfader for blending some tracks together without affecting volume. I just pulled up a simple plugin and modified the code, and a few minutes later, it did what I wanted. You can't do that sort of thing easily in other DAW's.

Plogue Bidule and Reaktor are other options for making custom tools without much coding experience needed.

This is always a good resource too. There's no excuse not to read it either, as it's free.

This will teach the fundamentals needed to program synths like sytrus/harmor effectively. I mean, you can just start with a preset and twiddle knobs and see where you end up, but it's not a bad idea to learn what's actually going on behind the knobs.

Tagging /u/Breezy482 to make sure this is seen.

If you don't mind paying, check out his other books. They go into more depth with particular types of synths, and the "Becoming a Synthesizer Wizard" takes the same concept of HTMAN into far more detail as well. I strongly recommend it.

Bonus: take it far enough and you can use DSP Robotics Flowstone (standalone or the version that comes with FL Producer edition or higher) and just make your own synth from the ground up!

Just wanted to point out something called "FlowStone".

http://www.dsprobotics.com/applications.html

Apparently, there is a version of this that gets bundled with FLStudio, as part of it's synth-making capabilities. But it is a standalone program as well. Looks like it works very similarly to SynthEdit/SynthMaker.

Also interesting (to me, at least), is that you can use it to create programs that interface with hardware like arduinos, home automation, and pull off things like computer vision. The output is an EXE.

And along with the visual programming aspect, you can run ruby scripts as part of your patches/programs.

Haven't tried it myself, but it seems pretty badass even if it is limited to windows.

Flowstone is a standalone program as well. It is not exclusive to FL, and never has been.

It is, unfortunately, being phased out of FL (Image-Line don't like the fact the there's no 64-bit Flowstone), but you can always use the standalone with no problems. Here's a link to the official website.

Personally, I think you should go for C++ (or whatever other language you're comfortable with), but Flowstone is also excellent.

:)

I have been using Synthmaker and Flowstone for years. Visual scripting makes sense when:

• The program is purely reactive - ie. something happens and it triggers changes that propagate "downstream" through the connected graph of self-contained components.
• The program is a series of signal processors that feed into each other.

Visual programming sucks very badly, when you need to implement some branching algorithm, that requires loops with non-trivial conditions and/or recursion. The program becomes a bowl of spaghetti that's nearly impossible to make sense of.

Flowstone does include a code component that let's you write C-like DSP code for signal streams, and also has Ruby component, that let's you write trigger-based components in Ruby. In any sensible program, majority of the business logic end up in there, and the visual programming is used just to put these components together. That's almost exactly the opposite of what you'd expect.

I don't have info on what he built his plugin on, but if it really is Synthmaker, which became FlowStone, then there's hope for a eventual 64bit version:

http://www.dsprobotics.com/support/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2608&hilit=64bit

FlowStone is currently testing on private alpha a 64bit version.

There's a few Flowstone developers that might be interested, if the idea hasn't been explored already. Why not do some searching/reading here and see if anything looks familiar, or if a particular dev seems like they might be copacetic with your thinking.

You can do this on your own with stuff you have like game controllers and virtual interfaces like knobs and effects with this little piece of awesome. It is called flowstone, and it is awesome for just about everything audio and interface.

http://www.dsprobotics.com/applications.html

If I'm not mistaken, Flowstone is 32-bit only, (possibly) never to be 64-bit.

On the Flowstone forums, people are begging the developers for 64-bit support and it doesn't look very likely.

Flowstone is not developed by Image-Line. Image-Line has almost no influence on how Flowstone is developed, including whether or not a 64-bit version is released.

As reflex said, the lack of 64-bit support for Flowstone is the main reason for it not being included with the FL installer. Note that Flowstone is developed by a completely separate company, and can still be downloaded/bought from the developer's website. They will continue to update it, it's just that it may not have further affiliation with FL Studio.

It's unfortunate, but it's mostly out of the Image-Line's hands.

If you're just starting out I'd try FlowStone http://www.dsprobotics.com/flowstone.html or if you know C++ Cockos' iPlug.

Hate to self promote, but I'm actually 70% complete writing a basic book on using those two to make audio plugs. May want to get on my mailing list if you want to get notified of when it's done.