Running FL Studio 9 under OSX using Wine

After installing FL Studio on my Ubuntu machine, I could not help but wonder if it would work as well under OSX (10.5.8 in my case). And the short answer is YES! It works even better.

And it was easy to do so thanks to this excellent tutorial by David Baumgold. I recommend one alternative step after step 4, as outlined below.

To setup FL Studio 9 on OSX take the following steps:

1. Follow David Baumgold’s tutorial up to Part 3. For installing applications use the following steps instead (they both work, but getting to know WineHelper.app early on will enable you to do more later on).

2. Download FL Studio 9

3. Inside the folder Darwine (created during your Wine installation under step 1) there is an application called WineHelper.app. Open this application.

4. Using WineHelper open one of the sample applications (in the Sample WineLib Applications folder in the Darwine folder) called winecfg.exe. When you open this you will see the windows configuration window as below. Go to Audio and enable the Core Audio Driver.

5. Now use WineHelper again to open the FLStudio Installation .exe that you have downloaded to install FL Studio.

6. If you have a FL Studio licence then download your reg file from image-line.com and open another one of the Sample WineLib Applications called regedit.exe. In this app you can Import your reg file and you on the next startup of FL Studio your registration and full access to all the application items you have purchased will be available for you.

7. Note that once you have installed a windows aplication you have to open them using WineHelper, selecting Open from the menu which takes you to your C: drive. This C drive is stored in a hidden file on your Mac, so it is more difficult to access it from your desktop.

If you wish you can always continue to Part 5 of David Baumgold’s instructions and use that to make a little applescript so that you have direct access.

I could not notice any latency, and to my amazement saw that FL Studio under Wine runs using all 8 cores on my MacPro.

Enjoy.