11-30-2010, 10:10 PM
Configuration
At the beginning of your Fl studio experience you'll notice that the first track that plays for you might make little crackling noises. This is because you haven't set up your audio settings. In the options menu at the top click on Audio Settings. In here you'll see a few different options, but to start you should uncheck "Multithreaded generator processing" and "Multithreaded mixer processing." I've set my interpolation to "Linear" and my sample rate to around 44100, and sometimes I change it to 48000 depending on what i'm doing. By default, you'll have your "Primary Sound Driver" selecte for your input/output by default. You can have this setting if you want, but if it doesn't produce a very high quality sound all you need to do is raise the buffer length by sliding the bar to the right. It's all about finding what best suits your computer, and depending on your CPU you may not be able to have a really high buffer. The other option is available to you, if you have installed ASIO4All, which is an optional download for FL studio upon installing the program. You can also download this after you've installed Fl studio though if you haven't downloaded it during the FL studio installation.
The only thing is, ASIO4All only allows you to have one audio device running at a time. Lots of people think that they have a problem with their sound driver when they can't play a track using ASIO4All because no sound is playing. My best guess would be that you have another device open that plays sound, including things like Itunes, or maybe you have a web browser open with a page that has a youtube video open. (There is sound in most youtube videos, yes
)After you've configured the most basic Audio settings, you can move on to the File settings by clicking on the "File" tab on the left. This is the place where you can tell FL studio where to look for VST directories. This is useful if you have multiple Music programs on your computer such as Cubase, pro tools, and/or FL studio on your computer. All three of these examples use VST's. If thats the case you can set a default folder in your program files called "VSTPlugins" for example. Then when you add that folder, you won't have to add VST's in the FL studio folder because it will search that general VST folder as well. This is optional though.
From here if you want you can click on the general settings and change your default skin if you wanted. Skins are available to download from a few places on the internet.
You can also change your wallpaper, by going into the View area in the main menu for FL studio, background > "Set bitmap wallpaper." Any jpegs will work fine for this as well as a few other formats, but for the skins and the wallpapers to be available to you, you need to place them in a specific folder. I have a 64 bit machine, so my location might be a little different for you, but the general location for me is
Wallpapers: C:\Program Files (x86)\Image-Line\FL Studio 9\Artwork\Skins
Skins: C:\Program Files (x86)\Image-Line\FL Studio 9\Artwork\Wallpapers
And the VST plugin location that you need to place your dll's
VST Plugins: C:\Program Files (x86)\Image-Line\FL Studio 9\Plugins\VST
It may be different for you though. If you want to find out easily just right click on the FL studio program and Open its file location. This will be the default directory for most of your FL studio projects, vst's, wallpapers, skins, etc..