Hehe, I have made more tracks in FL too, but I still prefer Cubase. For mastering I use Cool Edit, with some cool mastering plugins.
What kind of music do you make (alone, or with your band)?
Fruity Loops.. I gave up on before the end of a month of trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I watched tutorials, I read tutorials, I took apart other songs, but no matter what I tried I couldn't really get anything to work so I just gave up and got rid of it after that.
Fruity Loops can be really powerful when you know how to use it. Granted Cubase is in a different league, but my brother has produced some really good material with FL. He's been using it for a good 18 months now or so though.
Try Orion - it is head and shoulders above the competition... definitely the best value as well. There are a lot of similarities between Orion and LFS
Small team with big vision, innovation and high quality implementation, VFM... also great community.
Yup, fruity loops, can be very very powerful, as everything needs to be mastered!
I personally like it a lot, to me it's a very simple and versatile program, spend time by clicking everywhere (after tutorials of course) it's one heck of a strategy! Very effective!
As I understand it, Ableton Live is a perfect complement to Orion....
Reason is a toy !
comparing Reason to Cubase, Live or Orion is like comparing Mariokart to LFS !
can't even use vsti plugins ffs and the sound quality of the built-ins is very poor.
I never liked the FruityLoops interface, it's just too much of an arse to use.
Whereas Reason has an excellent, intuitive interface. I can work much faster with that.
I would have to agree, but it's the best by far of all these "toys" on the market. I wouldn't use it for anything serious, but for putting demos together and trying out ideas it's great - so quick to work with.
Of course Cubase is better - it's a proper, grown-up sequencer. Reason isn't competing with Cubase.
As for FL... I suppose it comes down to personal taste. I find it practically unusable. The cutesy interface gets in the way. It seems to be popular with bedroom dance record producers but I don't know any proper musicians who rate it.