Version 1.3.80 reviewed by Mitch Bechtel - 10/20/98

FruityLoops is a pleasure to use because of it's simple interface and easily obtainable results. Most of the features you'd expect in a beat sequencer are easily accessible and configurable. You can use preset sounds or load and use any wave file.

Installation

Installation is just a matter of running the self-extracting file and selecting a destination folder. One thing to note is a FruityPro folder is created as a sub-folder of the destination you select.

Interface

The interface is attractive and, for the most part, easy to use. You can customize the main window by moving the different panels, easily switch views from the menu, toolbar or hot keys and even alter the look of the program with "skins". Most of the programs commands have hot-keys which are displayed in the menus making them easy to learn.

Composing loops is done through an interface common to most beat sequencers. A drum patch/sound is assigned to a channel. Each channel is broken up into a time grid that spans the length of a pattern. The grid can have between 8 to 16 cells. Left-clicking turns on the drum, right-clicking turns it off. Each track can be muted, soloed and volume adjusted. You can also switch to a view that displays each drum's pan and volume for easy editing.

My only complaint about the interface is that it isn't always obvious what right-clicking will do. Sometimes it displays a popup menu like you'd expect, other times it will allow you to move a toolbar/panel, solo a channel or center a control.

Samples and MIDI

Wave files of any sample rate can be easily loaded for use on one of the channels (from menus as well as drag and drop). The samples can the be modified with several knobs and switches including:

• Global Pan/Volume/Mute
• 3 filters (overdrive, a type of ring modulator, sort of a phaser)
• attack/decay
• amplifier
• resonant filter (with cut off)
• stereo delay
• stretch
• fade left to right
• reverse stereo
• reverse sample
• polyphony settings

The MIDI implementation is fairly sparse, but sufficient enough for basic percussion composing. Like using samples, each channel can be assigned a MIDI sound. This is setup by selecting a MIDI channel, note, controller, patch and/or bank message to send for the drum sound. Although the MIDI port is selectable, only one port can be used at a time so you can't operate multiple MIDI devices that reside on different ports in the same song.

A main shortcoming of the program is its inability to sync MIDI and sample playback. And even though the documentation says that only MIDI or sample playback will occur at one time, when I switched to "MIDI only" mode, both MIDI and samples played together, out of sync.

Arranging Patterns

After you've put together a couple patterns, you'll probably want to setup a playback sequence. The playlist window does just that. It allows you to sequence up to 512 patterns in any order. The registered version is also able to play multiple patterns together.

Storing Results

You can save FruityLoops songs in a proprietary format or as a wave file. The proprietary format does not save the samples used in the song, so you have to be careful not to delete or move them. To get around this shortcoming, there is an option to place all the song's samples into a specific folder which, from there, can easily be zipped or kept together. A way to bundle the song information and samples into one file would make a nice future addition.

Bugs/Stability

I tested the shareware trial version on a Pentium 200 with a Sound Blaster AWE32 and encountered no serious problems. The wave playback gets a bit choppy when the hard drive starts chugging, but this can usually be controlled by staying inside the program during playback. A trivial window redraw problem occurs on the left edge of the window when I bring up the sample browser.

Final Analysis

A very solid program with lots of nice features that allow you to turn out useful rhythm patterns quickly. If you don't need anything more than basic MIDI control, it is definitely worth checking out.

Pros

• Sharp Interface
• Easy sample loading
• Nice preset samples
• Export to wave file
• Customizable

Cons

• Only basic MIDI functionality
• No external synchronization (added since this review!)
• Samples and MIDI can not play simultaneously (added since this review!)
• No direct way to save song and sample data into one file (added since this review!)