Session Atlas - native FL Studio project manager

Discussion in 'Software News' started by Parasocial, May 13, 2026.

  1. Parasocial

    Parasocial Member

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    Session Atlas 5_12_2026 5_03_41 PM.png

    EDIT: Update 1.1.1 released now!

    I was always slightly annoyed by how time-consuming it was to extract specific presets/patterns from other projects. For example, if I was working on a project and needed a specific pattern from another project, I would have to open another FL Studio instance, load the other project, export the pattern to MIDI, and then reimport the MIDI file into my current project. As some projects were quite large, this process took far too long. Yes, I know you can export project bones from specific projects, but this still requires opening the project directly beforehand.

    I have previously reverse-engineered the .flp format: A few years ago, I wrote a small Python script to extract project information and calculate how much time I had spent using FL Studio in total (which would not have been possible without the well-documented PyFLP project by Demberto: https://pyflp.readthedocs.io/). This got me thinking, and I started working on a full FL Studio project browser. Initially written in Python with a quick and dirty Plotly dashboard, I managed to get some of the core features, such as an SQLite project database with analytics, to work quite well. However, the general performance was poor, and I disliked the JavaScript web app implementation. Some crucial features I had in mind, especially drag-and-drop functionality, were not possible, so I abandoned the project for a while.

    At university, we had to learn C++, so I returned to the project a year ago with the intention of rewriting the engine from scratch to create a more efficient native implementation. This took a while; I was not prepared at all for a project of this scale. However, after many headaches, I now have a fairly stable and performant project manager, which I named Session Atlas.

    Release notes:

    Version 1.1.1:
    • Channel rack is now supported in the project view (individual midi track export, generator and track states...)
    • Sample and midi preview in the respective views (List view)
    • Better sample and midi filters
    • Catalog view now also supports key and time signature
    • Rudimentary reskinning to make it look more like FL Studio (WIP)
    • Fixed a bug where chopped audio clips in the playlist would not stretch and resize like in FL Studio
    • Analytic charts can now show up to 2500 entires
    • General performance optimization and smaller bug fixes

    So, what can you do with it?
    • Open and preview selected projects in a project viewer, where you can view the playlist, mixer, preview MIDI and samples, and show the file paths and their health. As the samples and previews are all lazy loaded, the database size remains small (in my case, around 90 MB for a directory with 1050 projects).
    • Direct export and drag-and-drop functionality: Every sample, pattern, mixer and plugin state can be exported directly to FL Studio. The .fst files are created from scratch, so if I missed any byte tags that I didn't come across during testing, this might not work all the time.
    • View and listen to global MIDI patterns and samples.
    • Get more detailed stats and analytics about your projects (e.g. duplicate projects, total time spent, most-used plug-ins, samples, and FL versions).
    • Export catalogue to CSV/JSON.
    • All projects are read locally
    Session Atlas 5_12_2026 4_56_54 PM.png

    There are still some known limitations:
    • Project health does not resolve all missing file paths. From my testing, Session Atlas is more conservative than FL Studio, so FL Studio will probably open some projects that have been tagged as false positives just fine.
    • Project families are not perfect. Because some of my projects have many different versions, I thought it would be useful to have duplicate detection. While it does work for direct FL backups, other projects with multiple versions were not correctly identified as one version.
    • I have not tested every FL Studio version; some very old versions could potentially cause issues. I have tested FL Studio versions from 12.0.2 to 25.2.5.

    So, what do you think? Are there any crucial features that I'm missing?

    Session Atlas 5_12_2026 5_04_52 PM.png
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2026
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  3. Parasocial

    Parasocial Member

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    And if you would like to try it out, you can download it from my Ko-Fi page. I'm currently considering selling it for €5, but I haven't made a final decision yet. If you'd like to test it, I can give it away for free for now.

    As it's still in the testing phase, I wouldn't feel right charging too much for my buggy code.
     
  4. Chrissz79

    Chrissz79 Noisemaker

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    It looks very interesting. I would like to test it. Can you pm me the download
     
  5. scoldt

    scoldt Ultrasonic

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    Hi,

    I'd like to test it please !
    Seems uselful.

    Edit : you meant the trial version I guess... oops
     
  6. scoldt

    scoldt Ultrasonic

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    To anyone using FL Studio on Audiosex and sister site, you should really try it.
    It is so cool to have access to the content of all FL Studio files without having to open them and wait. You can save clips and midis from it. See what plugins are used, which version of FLS, time consumed,...
    If you added the possibility to rename stuff in batch it would be impossible to miss.
    Thank you for making this.
    Can I suggest functions ?

    If yes , the first thing would be the ability to see all plugins past the top 200.
     
  7. SacyGuy

    SacyGuy Producer

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    really cool, man
    I appreciate your effort on this project
    I'm buying it right now and gonna test
     
  8. scoldt

    scoldt Ultrasonic

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    Hey Parasocial,
    You should sell it directly to Image-Line, they definitely need it !
     
  9. oneunder

    oneunder Ultrasonic

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    Ta man.
     
  10. Chrissz79

    Chrissz79 Noisemaker

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    I have bought it. I will give it a try. If you do updates, will I get them?
     
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  11. Parasocial

    Parasocial Member

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    Yeah, thank you for your support!

    I am currently working on some updates... I found out that the current version still has some issues with waveform rendering in the playlist which I didn't account for.

    And I added the channel rack and synthesizer plugin state export which works pretty well so far... I need some further testing, but I will probably push the update either today or over the next few days.

    If you have any suggestions, I can see what I can do :wink: it might take some time, I am still learning C++ though and I hate vibe-coded slop, so maybe it will take longer.

    I was thinking about it as well. I will probably do some further development and testing first so it looks more like a finished product!

    Thanks for the suggestion, I will look at it!

    I honestly missed that you can only see plugins in the analytics tab up to 200 plugins at once, should be an easy fix!
    As for the renaming, this could be a little more challenging as all the project data is not directly accessed but read-only via the sqlite database so the original project files are never truly touched. This was intentional so far as I was afraid of modifying my project data for testing and accidentally corrupting my files. But if you want something like that, I can see what is possible.

    On a similar note, for a future release I want to do something for entire project folder backups that can be compressed/decompressed and are more space efficient than just copying the whole folder itself (would be nice for version control ig).
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 28, 2026
  12. scoldt

    scoldt Ultrasonic

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    Re Parasocial,

    Your software is wonderful! I can't tell enough how handy it is.

    I noticed that midi preview always plays with piano sound. Could you make that drums midi are played with some drum sound instead of piano ?

    When I talked about renaming, I was thinking about very limited renaming function. I do know that batch editing files is a full task apart.

    I was thinking just about a function that like put a prefix to all files or whynot prefix + track name/number, for example :

    Session-01.flp containing A-sample B-sample X-midi Y-midi -> files named like this Session-01-A-Sample
    Session-01-B-Sample
    Session-01-X-Midi and so on

    Last point, Could you make automation exportable like midis and samples ? And/or whynot give them their own category in the left column with sample, midis, health etc.

    Thank you for your work. It is so cool to dig in projects without having to open any. Great.
     
  13. scoldt

    scoldt Ultrasonic

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    Little detail, maybe you can make a handful more themes if it's not too boring to do ^^
     
  14. Parasocial

    Parasocial Member

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    Yes, midi playback is still very rudimentary for now, I want to change that as it currently just uses default Windows midi playback engine. I can do something about that maybe :wink:
    But full Vst support isn't worth it as it would require a lot of overhead and complexity... At this point this would basically be a read-only DAW.

    Regarding renaming, I get what you mean. This sounds definitely achievable, I will see what I can do!

    Automation export has been on my mind for a while. This just has been delayed by a bit because I haven't fully reverse-engineered automation creation in flps yet: that's a limit of the current version of Session Atlas as well as it can't decode more complex automation shapes (e.g. sine wave, pulse...)

    Sure, themes are an easy addition. If you want I could also enable custom theming!
     
  15. scoldt

    scoldt Ultrasonic

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    Re,
    I didn't mean full vst support (be reassured!). Just rudimentary drum sound for drum :yes:.


    I don't know if you know about MuseScore Studio 4. It is a free, probably open source score editor. But it has many other functions.
    It supports vst, vsti etc... But more importantly regarding our discussion, it comes with a few dozens of simple soundfonts than enable the choice of type of instrument that plays while previewing scores. It includes quite enough stuff to preview pretty much anything.
    As it is an opensource software, maybe you can directly use their soundfonts...? (sorry if I'm saying things that don't make sense ^^)

    https://handbook.musescore.org/fr/sound-and-playback/soundfonts

    THeir official download links (I suppose) https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/soundfonts-and-sfz-files#list

    Sorry, I thought this was way simpler than it seems now reading your answer:woot:

    Yeah, I insist I mean really minimal renaming. But if it is more of another software than a little add on please forget what I said !

    I don't really like spending time personalizing GUIs lol , so I was just thinking about YOU adding a few more...:shalom::rofl:

    Please, don't forget to let us see the whole list of plugins used in analytics. It is so f**king useful to know exactly what bunch of vst and softwares you have to keep anytime in order to be able to open them in the future ! (add "without opening .flp" behind every sentence)
    BTW FL Studio versions list is very useful too. So many versions have passed....:guru:
     
  16. scoldt

    scoldt Ultrasonic

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    You know what ? Forget the renaming thing... Hearing the right instrument is much more important ! I don't want to load you with useless requests !
     
  17. Parasocial

    Parasocial Member

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    Haha no worries! Better soundfonts are on my mind, I already did some rudimentary testing. I have soundfonts I can use for the project, this is not the main issue, but thank you nonetheless :wink:
    The much larger part will be a native audio engine for better playback support. Currently everything runs on one media thread which is fine for simple playback but is laggy and in some cases glitches out. MuseScore has WMI/ASIO support which makes audio handling way more stable and performant, but this could fight FL Studio ASIO (not what we want if we run FL and Session Atlas in parallel).
     
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