These days a staunch anti-piracy article exists on the Image-Line website, while Dambrin himself seems to have a much more casual view on the matter. how much it helped spread the brand and user base. Pirated versions on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa also helped the software gain a fair share of users, such as Grammy Award–winning producer Hit-Boy, though it is difficult to formally weigh how much piracy hurt FL Studio (as Fruity Loops would later be renamed) during its formative years vs. Over time, the program slowly found its footing with a user base of young, eager producers who wanted to make beats, had access to a computer, and couldn't afford a traditional sampler. The popularity of Fruity Loops during product launch gave Cannie and Van Biesen signs of hope, but they had a hard time getting people to buy it instead of settling for a free demo during the DAW's first years of existence.

During this wave of surprising initial support, Cannie and Van Biesen made the decision to give existing customers free updates for life-a generous offer they continue to give to paying clients. 'When he dropped it on our machines it was a simple, MIDI-only step sequencer that we were having trouble placing in our existing product range,' Cannie wrote in a history of the company on its website.Įven still, the company's servers were overwhelmed by enthusiastic downloaders just a few days after the first version of Fruity Loops went up on the website. When he passed version 1.0 off to them in 1997, they were unsure how to sell it. 'It was absolutely nothing like what it is today.'ĭambrin's bosses also had no idea Fruity Loops would turn into a massive success.

'It hadn't started very seriously,' he told Noisey in a 2015 interview. Despite Dambrin's interest making a fun program for musicians to mess around with, he never thought his creation would morph into a powerful pattern-based DAW used by many industry behemoths. Though Dambrin started out as the mastermind behind first-person shooters like Eat This, he developed the first iteration of Fruity Loops in 1997 after trying other early music software like Hammerhead and Rebirth.

The software first began taking shape in Belgium during the early '90s, when Image-Line co-founders Jean-Marie Cannie and Frank Van Biesen hired a 19-year-old developer named Didier 'Gol' Dambrin.

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