.FLP File Format

Introduction

These are the projects saved by FL Studio 6 up to version 11.4. The file keeps the FLhd header and FLdt event stream of earlier versions, gains many new events as FL Studio gains features, and still stores its text as single bytes.

No document from Image-Line covers these versions. What is known comes from open-source readers, which in places disagree, and the exact versions at which some changes happened are not recorded.

Structure

The file is a 14-byte header chunk and a data chunk holding one long stream of events. The differences from earlier and later files that readers rely on are:

• Volume and pan. LMMS’s old importer, and the node-flp reader, divide channel volume and pan values by 100 for files from version 6.0 on, which shows that these values are stored on a larger scale from that version.
• Text is still single-byte. PyFLP reads it as ASCII; another reader, flpkit, reads it as Latin-1, which also covers accented letters.
• Mixer inserts. PyFLP estimates 105 insert slots up to version 9.0 and 127 after it, and marks the figures as estimates.
• Playlist. There is one playlist of 199 tracks. Two readers disagree on the size of its item records, 28 or 32 bytes, and PyFLP dates pattern items in it to version 7.0.

Somewhere between the early versions and FL Studio 20, the tempo moved from the old events 66 and 93 to event 156, which holds the BPM times 1000. No source records which version made the change, so a reader should accept either.

Telling it apart

The FL Studio version text event (199) is at least 6.0 and below 11.5. If text events contain a zero byte after every Latin character, the file is from 11.5 or later instead.

Variants

• FruityLoops 1 to FL Studio 5 – early projects: single-byte text, old tempo events and the 1999 layout
• FL Studio 6 to 11.4 – single-byte text, with volume and pan on a newer scale
• FL Studio 11.5 to 12 – every string but the version switches to UTF-16LE
• FL Studio 20 – multiple arrangements, 500 playlist tracks and 125 mixer inserts
• FL Studio 21 and later – 60-byte and longer playlist records, and an event that breaks the size rule

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