An Introduction to FL Studio 12: Exporting Your Track
Congratulations! You’ve finished your track and are ready to share it with the world! This article will help you with all things dealing with exporting your track. But first, you must take these steps before you export.
Clipping the Master Channel is one of the most common issues that people have in their mix and look over before they export. Every producer wants to have a loud, thumpy track that stands out but there are much better alternatives for having this other than turning up all the levels on your mixer. Make sure that your master track doesn’t exceed 0 dB or else your mix will be distorted, loud, and have a worse tonal quality. Deceptively, FL Studio’s internal channels use 32 bit depth which is a scalar amplitude system. This means that within the program your sounds won’t clip. However, once you export to a fixed bit depth like 16 or 24, or convert your export at 32 to an mp3, any overs suddenly become clips. If you end up in the red it won’t be a problem inside FL but could be pretty gnarly once printed. The solution is turning down the sampling level and raising the monitor level. You should use a limiter on your master channel to boost the levels of everything without clipping.
Keep in mind that muted tracks, samples, and patterns will not appear in the exported file if they’re still muted. Double check that everything you want to hear (or not hear) is correct.
Make sure that your master volume and pitch are centered. When testing some things, you might find your master volume and pitch has been tweaked but if they’re not in their default settings, it will drastically change the sound of your whole track.
Exporting with the Highest Quality cannot be ignored in the final steps. All of your hard work and hours in the studio cannot lead up to you releasing something with worse quality sound than you created.
Under “Project Type” select “Full Song” and “Leave Remainder”.
Under “Quality” select the highest resampling rate you can pick. Currently that number is 512. Enable “HQ For All Plugins” and “Disable Max Polyphony”. If you are exporting to 24 or 16 bits, enable “Dithering” as well.
If you’re collaborating with other artists or want to Mix on another device or software, using the splitting the mixer tracks option when exporting is essential and is a very helpful tool to separate all of the tracks on the playlist one by one.
When sending previews of tracks you’ve created, export them as an MP3 file to minimize rendering time and maximize space on your device and disk. If not, you usually should export what you have as a WAV file.