Didier Dambrin

Interviewed by Rick "Brujo" Wishart

What's wrong with your loops? Do they need a little Rock-Melon, a dash of Passion-Fruit, perhaps a Ba-Na-Na-Na or maybe some Fig-aro, Fig-aro, Fig-aro, Fig-aro, Fig-aro? Well, once again Sonikmatter's intrepid reporters have braved the electron storm of the Internet to track down Didier Dambrin, designer and programmer of FruityLoops, to discover not only the genesis of this funky program but also the Gorbachev connection, 'Eat This', Saltwater and crayfish! Intrigued? Well, so were we! So, dear readers if you wish to unravel this puzzle and find out more then you know the score - follow the hyperlinks!

Sonikmatter: What's your background in music and programming?

Didier: Unfortunately I have no musical background. I started programming a long time ago, mainly on bad video games, to finally end up with satisfactory platform games. But as the game industry started to become too big (we made a commercial platform game that came out a couple of years too late), I tried the compromise between video games and technical tools: musical applications, as they were/are easier and almost as fun to work on as a video game.

I in fact made a classic music 'tracker' a long time before FruityLoops, an OPL3 (the musical FM chip in early SoundBlaster cards) tracker called 'ZIC', which probably no one ever saw or used. It was a poor old DOS tracker with a very Scream Tracker-like interface, supporting many formats and allowing control of the OPL chip in depth.

But that was years before FruityLoops, and when FruityLoops started I couldn't even remember how many semitones per octave there is, in other words, it didn't really help.

Sonikmatter: What games and platforms did you program?

Didier: It all began with the Amstrad CPC but never went far - this was with a breakout game, removing the ball and replacing the racket by a little guy [the standard charset of the CPC had a couple of funny guys and a rocket in it] freely moving at the bottom of the screen got me stuck into programming. But it really started with the PC, for which I made a lot of crappy games, for example, like about every programmer, a tetris clone with the very original name of "T-Tris"! This is hard to find now as I don't have a homepage anymore. Before the internet was popular, it was so hard learning how to program, as technical information or just a little piece of code wasn't easy to find. Now it's much easier to start programming, and 32-bit programming is also much easier than 16-bit used to be.

An ok game that can still be found is 'Space Bastards' (a small shooter game, nothing to do with another one called 'Robosaurs vs the Space Bastards'). Even works under Windows 3.1.

The last and better game was a platform game called 'Eat This', made by Image-Line, just before FruityLoops. You can try www.eatthis.com. Took too much time to finish, while the hardware didn't wait, so it was a little outdated, unfortunately. But it got sold.

Sonikmatter: What's your view of the game industry these days?

Didier: It's so big - it's probably not as fun to work on a game anymore. But the results are worth it (for the gamer that is), games (well, not all of them) are so amazing. Technically that is, because only a few games are fun to play. And thank goodness for online games, even if they're partly the reason that PC games are selling a little less. If you've never played it, a very good game (though rather old now) I'd recommend is Rune. But you've got to like vikings.. and chopping heads.. and eating lizards...

Now I also like and play old arcade games, especially fighting ones, a lot. I miss 2D games!

Today everything has to be 3D. 3D graphic chips roughly appeared at the same time as support for high-res screen resolutions and colors, so there never really was any good slick-looking 2D games, except Oddworld (which is now 3D on the XBox, and looks great, but definitely not as slick as the first episode). Classic 2D arcade games of the 90's, and I'm not talking about Pacman, but post-Double Dragon games, could have become something great with modern display resolution and color depth. There are of course a lot of 3D games with 2D gameplay, but they don't look as good - though it will probably change in the future.

2D games on the GameBoy Advance (though the GBA also suffers from the '3D everywhere' syndrome and has some poor fake-3D games) are cool. After the GBA (when pocket consoles will have a good 3D chip that is), 2D games will probably revive in cell phones, and will then die.. until graphic cards will be so powerful that gameplay will have as much value as display.

But this has nothing to do with music applications, and I haven't even commented on the musical games that seem so popular in japan!

Sonikmatter: When did the genesis of FruityLoops begin?

Didier: It was, if I trust the history file, in 1998. It didn't start seriously, because at that time there were only 2 interesting (read: fun to use) music apps, Rebirth 338 and the Hammerhead drum machine. I wanted to merge the coolness of both in a drum machine that wouldn't have their main limitation, that is a single row of 'steps' shared between all the drums. The first FruityLoops was named 'FrootyLoops'. The splash screen already featured a fruit, with a worm in it and then I was told that the worm looked like a penis (although it had eyes, go figure), and so the worm was removed!

The difficulties were mainly in Windows programming, as my previous apps had all been made with the old Borland's Turbo Pascal, today known as Inprise's Delphi. I think the strength of FruityLoops is mainly in its interface. I guess that old trackers had such success because they looked appealing, while big sequencers had boring silver interfaces, and were showing all of their complex features at once, scaring most people.

Sonikmatter: What inspired and influenced the user interface design of FruityLoops?

Didier: Graphically, probably old trackers, the fun ones, like the mighty FastTracker 2. As for the colors, a little of ReBirth 338 maybe, but that was for Fruity before version 3. As for the layout, it might be closer to a DOS app in a way, since it's made to work fast and has many keyboard shortcuts. It also doesn't really follow standard Windows rules, as many features aren't accessible from the keyboard, and the right mouse button is used a lot. But I find it easy and intuitive, and it's often said to be (as opposed to the famous sequencers), so it must be!

Sonikmatter: Do end-users suggestions influence the ongoing development of FruityLoops?

Didier: The delicate art here is to make the end-users believe they have influence, but not to follow their tips slavishly!

Honestly many users come up with either weird, or stupid ideas, or completely undoable things. When the requested features are good and doable, they're usually already being worked on, or sometimes even done already or in the planning stage.

There really are enough things on our to-do list not to need more stressing feature requests!

This might sound pretentious, however in my humble opinion it's more pretentious to think that no one else ever had our 'new wonderful idea'. Usually someone else had it, and sometimes it's already materialized somewhere, if not, it's more because it's harder to achieve than to think of!

Sonikmatter: Do you do all the programming for FruityLoops?

Didier: I do all the programming for the FruityLoops application. Several FruityLoops plugins, or the engines they use, are made by various people, who are usually the best at
what they do. Frederic works on side things, like support for VSTi and DXi plugins, other apps like FruityTracks, etc. JM manages the web sites and the Image-Line company with Frank. Yes it takes a lot of time, so it's better not work on anything else. The next version of FruityLoops is always better, or should be!

Sonikmatter: What made you choose the developers for the FruityLoops plugins?

Didier: Simply the fact they had made plugins already, or proved they could do it. For example, Ultrafunk had a very good, and cheap, DirectX reverb plugin. So we asked them to develop a version of it especially for FruityLoops. Good reverbs aren't that easy, all of the lame freeware, not that freeware means lame, reverb plugins are proving it. Another example is the Wasp plugin, developed by Richard Hoffmann who originally made the TS404 bassline synth in early versions of FruityLoops. That TS404 was itself a standalone product of him.

Sonikmatter: What features do you feel users don't fully utilise?

Didier: Automation, definitely. FruityLoops gives a lot of means to automate things, and about everything can be automated. But it's not used enough. Or it's used for fun - you can do complex things by linking knobs to internal controllers, there even is a 'formula controller' plugin - but not enough in song projects. Though now it's starting to be used more and more, as the users start to master the recent features.

Sonikmatter: What's your view on Cubase, Logic and Sonar?

Didier: They are classics. You know, like books, that you wished you had read, but don't want to read. They're the ones that are supposed be used, but are too scary because of their complexity, and you don't really 'want' to learn them. So if you don't actually have to learn them, it's hard to start, and I never dared to. That's my opinion for Sonar and Cubase, as I don't know Logic, which seems to have a worse learning curve. They're probably the best tools for what they're supposed to do, but they're certainly not applications you can use for fun or have fun whilst using.

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