TROUBLESHOOTING
This section contains answers to common questions and problems that may occur while working in FL Studio. Please, read this carefully before posting about problems in the tech-support message board!
The first things you will have to set up are the MIDI output driver (if you plan to use MIDI) or the DirectSound driver (you probably want to import your own drum samples). If you don't set any of them you won't get any output!
| Problem | Solution |
| The program reports about missing DirectX, then halts. |
YOU NEED DIRECTX 5 OR LATER TO BE INSTALLED ON YOUR SYSTEM. The latest DirectX (currently 8) is available at the Microsoft web site. You can find a link to it at www.flstudio.com. You may also find the DirectX installer on CD's that go with many popular magazines. Also please read below about Windows NT! |
| No audio output. | If you don't get any sound be sure you've selected at least a DirectSound driver (see Audio settings) or a MIDI driver (see MIDI settings). Be sure the DirectSound driver has been initialized & working. If you don't get any MIDI sound from the playing loop you probably forgot to enable the 'Enable MIDI' menu option (see Options menu). |
| The sound is 'choppy' and strange (blips & glitches). | Be sure you've got the latest DirectX drivers & not emulated DirectSound drivers. You may try to put the mixing buffer length (see Audio settings) to the max. Note that you may also try to reduce it to minimize the latency. Today's soundcards can handle from 100ms down to 5ms latency.You may also have glitches problems if the playing loop eats too much CPU or when opening or closing other windows. Windows 9x is more or less animated, & some of those animations are very bad for the timing in audio applications. To fix that problem, go to the display settings (in Windows 98), select the "Effects" tab & uncheck the "Animate windows, menus and lists" box. There are other ways to optimize Windows 9x for audio applications, you can learn more about this on the Internet. Once again be sure you've got the proper DirectSound drivers accelerated for your soundcard. Also be sure no other CPU consuming or special application is running at the same time. |
| I upgraded and the automation doesn't work properly anymore. | Probably you are coming from FruityLoops 2, where the automation is written in one single global track. Events in FL Studio are pattern based now. This means there is no more one global automation track - events are saved locally to each pattern (the selected pattern is the pattern where automation goes during recording). The old FruityLoops 2.x projects are imported by creating one additional pattern called "Main Automation" which replaces the global events tracks. |
| A TS404 pattern doesn't play in song mode, but plays in pattern mode. | The
TS404 is a monophonic synthesizer. That means it can not generate more than
one tone at a moment. That is why when you trigger several patterns that
contain TS404 notes and/or property changes (cutoff and pitch in the Graph
Editor) only the topmost pattern is played and the rest are ignored.
Sometimes, you might skip to clear some patterns from TS404 data and they can mute another TS404 sequence placed below in the Playlist. To make sure that the patterns you trigger together with your TS404 sequence do not contain any data for the same TS404, switch to each pattern you want to clear, select the corresponding TS404 channel and press Ctrl+X (or select Cut from the Edit menu). That way all notes and properties in the Step Sequencer are set to default and the pattern is considered free of TS404 sequence data. |
| The chords menu doesn't pop up in the Randomizer. | This might be caused because of using custom font sizes and/or windows scheme. To cure the problem, try to switch back Windows to "small fonts" and use Windows Standard scheme (go to Control Panel > Display > Appearance). |
| FL Studio reports HHCTRL.OCX is missing, then halts. | This problem may occur in computers with older Windows installed (first releases of Windows 95). To cure the problem, install a newer version of Internet Explorer, which includes the necessary files. Note that if you really don't have that file installed, you shouldn't be able to open this help file as well... |
| FL Studio crashes when trying to open the Piano Roll window. | Some people reported such crashes on systems with ATI Xpert video cards. Download and install the latest drivers available for your video card to fix the problem. |
| FL Studio' interface looks strange, the colors are distorted. | You're
probably running Windows in 256 colors (palletized) or less. Please switch
to 16Bit (high color) or 24/32Bit (true color) display modes. Everything
under Windows is ugly in palletized display. Luckily today's computers (even
laptops) can easily handle true color modes. For the best quality &
smoothness in FL Studio we suggest you switch your display to 24Bit mode.
Now your graphic board might not support 24Bit display. In this case switch
to 32Bit mode. By the way, remember that FL Studio 1.x & 2.x skins
are NOT compatible so don't use any of them.
You should also know that almost every early graphic driver has minor bugs. If you notice things not drawn properly, it might be your graphic driver (which should be updated). |
| Any of the *.WAV files fail to load, but all the *.SS2 presets load fine. | For
some reason, some people have all their Windows sound ACM codecs disabled.
FL Studio needs them in order to translate compressed *.WAV files to PCM. Under Windows, follow Start > Settings > Control Panel > Multimedia > Devices tab > Audio Compression Codecs. For each of the listed codecs, click Properties, then check "Use this audio codec" (if it's disabled). |
| FL Studio used to work fine, but now it keeps crashing at startup. |
If it doesn't work anymore, but has worked once then you may try to do a config 'reset'. To do this, launch the Reset settings shortcut (Start Menu > Programs > FL Studio 3> Advanced > Reset Settings) & let it delete the needed registry keys. Note: if you're running under WinNT, the shortcut switch might not work correctly, you might have to use regedit.exe. Take care not to delete any other registry entry! You can still use the Microsoft System Information tool to backup your registry if you're not sure (Important: don't use regedit.exe if you are not familiar with registry, since this may damage your Windows!). |
| FL Studio crashes at startup. |
Some people have reported a crash when Windows is in 16Bit display. There's no reason for FL Studio not to work fine in 16Bit display but anyway you can try to switch to 24Bit (True Color) & see if it corrects your problem. Also according to the same people a problem may occur because of network cards. Again there's no reason for not to work when a network card is installed... We've also been reported that old display drivers for the Diamond Viper v330 were causing a crash while FL Studio is running. Updating those drivers should fix that. |
| DirectX plugins disappeared from the plugin list. | Uninstall DirectX and then reinstall it again (DirectX can not be directly uninstalled. You should use third party tools, such as DirectX Buster - http://directxbuster.de/index_e.html). |
| The loop points in the sample view can't be added or moved. | Loop points can't be set inside FL Studio. They are part of the sample itself, and they can be set using external wave editor. Also, when you play looped wave sample in FL Studio and you hear pops and clicks, this means that the loop points of the sample are not well chosen. Well chosen loop points match end offsets (amplitudes) of the sample points and also match end slopes of the waveform as much as possible. Also, if the sample volume varies over time, you should set loop points so that level is equal or close to equal in the start and end loop points. Also, unless you're making a sample to be used as an oscillator shape, you should avoid creating short loops (less than ~50ms), because they may sound pitch shifted, thus not matching the pitch of the rest of the sample. |
| The sound becomes strange when you move windows or sliders. | This happens with some graphic boards (for example older versions of Matrox Mystique) which lock the bus when they shouldn't. Be sure you've got the latest drivers for your graphic card, it may correct the problem. |
| Can FL Studio have several instances running at the same time? | Yes,
just make sure not to pass any command line parameter. If you specify a
loop file by the command line, the same instance will load it (for convenience).
If you don't, then another instance will be opened. Please note that Windows 9x graphics resources are very limited (due to compatibility problems), so opening several (4 or over) instances of FL Studio (which is graphically intensive) could crash your whole system! |
| You need more information about the LAME MP3 encoder used in FL Studio to export MP3 files. | You can find more info & the standalone version of LAME at www.sulaco.org/mp3. LAME is distributed under the GNU General Public License (see Texts\LGPL.txt for details). LAME was written by Mike Cheng & Mark Taylor. The DLL used in was written by Albert Faber, based on the original BladeEnc DLL interface written by Tord Jansson. |
| The loop sample always overlaps when it's retriggered. You want it to cut itself. | Just push the 'cut itself' button in the channel settings menu. |
| Some plugins suddenly start eating extremely much CPU power, while they performed good in a while. | Sometimes
happens that a plugin starts eating a huge amount of CPU when not fed for
a while. It looks strange but it's not. Floating points are stored as a
base & exponent. It works well, except for very small numbers (those
are called tiny numbers, or denormalized numbers). Those tiny numbers are
stored differently, & the math coprocessor actually eats much more CPU
in that 'denormalization' process (that can also trigger an exception on
demand).
There are workarounds, but they can only apply in the DSP functions themselves. FL Studio can't do much about it, it's up to the plugin (& most of the ones that come with FL Studio do it) to check if the values are very close to zero & snap them to zero instead. |
| Your song uses too much processing power and you can't play it in real-time without underruns even with maximum audio buffer. | Use the tips in the Optimizing CPU and Memory Usage page. |
| How to sync FL Studio to a MIDI sequencer. |
As with any other music app running under Windows, you need a virtual MIDI
cable to achieve sync with FL Studio. FL Studio can act as a MASTER
CLOCK. Just set your sequencer (or any other app) to be the slave &
be sure it uses the correct virtual MIDI device. WARNING: Don't use Hubi's LoopBack device as the virtual MIDI cable. For some unknown (to us) reason it can loose clock messages so the sync will be really bad when you start moving windows (probably a 32bit threading problem)... Instead, use MIDI Yoke which seems very stable & does its job pretty well. You can download & get information about MIDI Yoke at: http://www.channel1.com/users/jamieo/html/midiyoke.html. You can find a more detailed explanation in the online manuals available at our web site. |
| Is FL Studio working under Windows 2000? | Yes, normally. |
| FL Studio working under Windows NT4? | Not officially. This is because there's no official DirectX5 for Windows NT4. However, you can download an unofficial patch for DirectX5 under WinNT at Erik Unger's DirectX page (from JEDI-Project). You could also do a search on the net for the NT4DX5.ZIP file. FL Studio is said to work okay under Windows NT using this unofficial DirectX5 version. Now you won't find accelerated drivers for this DirectX so you will have to deal with a bigger mixing buffer (meaning slower response). |