I'm running this with a PC: 8 GB (4x2GB) ram, 6 years old laptop. The biggest songs (7-9 minutes at the moment) that I've made, ENTIRELY using midi and sampled instruments (including Evolution Dracus (sold for about 150 €), a massive sample-8-string guitar pack with amps, cabs, effects; and including Cytrus in this FL Studio edition (for free), a wonderful, massive additive/FM synth; and including drum samples (played with FPC, included in this FL version)) are just pushing the limits of what my laptop can handle (taking over 4 GB of RAM with the craziest projects, when mixing, loads of heavy synths and guitars, sample-drums, etc., a shit-ton of plugins loaded, 30+ mixer tracks) - but even so, I'm having no problems with performance aspects with FL with my average (700 €) laptop.
So what does this mean?
This means, that you can make top-quality songs from scratch on an average.....good laptop, and mix them professionally.
There is absolutely no reason not to buy this.
Be sure to watch In the Mix -producing- and FL-Studio tutorials on YouTube, the guy is a pro and a teacher, and makes top quality videos.
I shit you not, buying this ^^ thing here was the best buy I've ever made. You can do whatever you want with FL Producer edition. You can also download free symphony orchestra vst's to this. Also be sure to download Youlean loudness meter (loudness in LUFS and true peaks in db, free), SPAN (free, eq and listening tool), and whatever the hell you need.
Seriously, this is amazing. Also, you get lifetime free updates (which are actually amazing, and I mean this, and they make a video on YouTube everytime they have a new update ready, in which they explain everything included/changed in the update - usually they add stuff, like plugins, and add options/menus/routes for stuff.
So: this is a recording software, composing software (although it does NOT have musical notation, but trust me, it's not an issue), mixing software and mastering software. It's smooth as hell, doesn't take much cpu or ram, looks goddamn nice and doesn't lag (when you have the right settings, just look up In the Mix -videos).
To this day I've produced proge/rock/metal game music, swing, orchestral swing, a flute piece and vocoder-enhanced ambient music with this.
If you use any notation software like Guitar Pro for example, you can export the midi from there, and then import into FL. The same thing works the other way around; you can export MIDI and even music notes from FL Studio (either one pattern or multiple patterns, or the whole song (all patterns)).
There's just.... nothing you CAN'T do. I absolutely love this program. It takes a few days to wrap your head around the whole thing (or maybe a couple of hours, if you're quick to learn, i dunno). But everything you need to know is in tutorials on YouTube, on Reddit, etc.
I'm honestly just very happy that I got this, that's the reason for all this rant.
So, a technical aspect: if you want to make songs from scratch, you pretty much need 8 GB of RAM, 4 is not enough unless you export some tracks to WAV so that you don't have all the tracks in MIDI, played "live" all the time.
I've had FL crash maybe around... 10 times during 500 hours of work. For reference, Guitar Pro crashes more often (my experience). So, it's very rare, and also, you can set exactly the time you want for FL to take safe copies of your project, so there's no risk of losing anything.
File corrupts: never happened to me. Whereas Guitar Pro 6 (it's not a "real" DAW btw) has corrupted the file running 2 or 3 times (in 3 years, I guess).
You can also change your background picture, color tracks and channels etc. pretty easily (and make FL do the coloring and naming automatically in-between playlist tracks, channels and mixer tracks), organize your folders, drag stuff directly into FL (plugins, audio (wav, mp3)), etc.
For some reason, ctrl+alt doesn't work in FL for me, so I can't use all the quick keys. Weird, and I haven't found a solution yet. That's my only complaint in addtion to the (very rare!) crashes.
But anyhow: FL is absolutely crazy, I love it, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
