Honeydew: an open-source music studio, in your browser.

At a glance

What Honeydew is

Honeydew is a clean-room reimplementation. Its authors wrote down FL Studio Mobile's behaviour, file formats and look as a specification, then wrote the program from that specification alone; the project states that it contains no code, samples, presets or artwork from the original, and that even its icons are drawn in code. It builds for Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Android and iOS, and, because it is written in Rust with a GPU-drawn interface, for the browser as well. It is an independent project, not affiliated with Image-Line, whose FL Studio trademark is used here only to say what the program is modelled on. It is listed on Recomp, a catalogue of clean-room and reverse-engineered software.

Getting a sound out of it

Press start and wait for the empty song to appear. The plus in the middle adds a channel: a drum channel, an instrument, or one of the synths, among them a subtractive MiniSynth, a SuperSaw, a three-oscillator synth and one called Transistor Bass. Pick MiniSynth and the keys along the bottom play it at once. Pick Drums and a list of kits opens; choose one, close the list, and the hexagonal pads play its drums. Checked on this page's copy: a held MiniSynth key and a Rock Kit pad both sound, the kit after its samples have been fetched from this site. The round play button runs the song.

A browser only lets a page make sound after a click, so the first press inside the app also wakes its audio. The interface is designed for touch, which makes it one of the few studio programs that is comfortable on a tablet in a browser; on a phone it is usable but tight.

Opening and saving

According to the project, Honeydew opens FL Studio Mobile songs and project archives, FL Studio .flp projects and MIDI files, from its SONGS menu, with Ctrl+O, or by dropping the file on the window, and saves songs, MIDI, FLP archives and audio (WAV, FLAC, OGG or MP3). An FLP brings its channels, patterns, playlist, clips, tempo, volume and pan; plugins and samples it cannot find are replaced with the closest bundled sound, with a summary of what was swapped. We have verified that the app runs and plays here; we have not tested every import and export path in the browser, so treat that list as the project's.

One thing is different on this page. To keep the app away from this site's storage it runs in a sandboxed frame, and a sandboxed frame has no storage of its own. Nothing is kept between visits: save your song to a file from the app's menu before you close the tab, and expect sounds to download again next time. The project's desktop and Android builds keep everything on disk and are the better home for real work.

The sounds

Honeydew's full library is about 740 MB of sampled instruments, all under free licences (most are CC0, from collections such as FreePats, Versilian Studios and the University of Iowa's instrument samples). Hosting all of it here would be out of proportion for a page whose job is to let you try the program, so this copy carries a subset: every drum kit, the one-shot drums and effects, 31 of the smaller instruments (basses, organs, pads, plucked and bowed strings, mallets, an electric piano) and one upright piano. The sound list inside the app shows exactly those, and the app's own credits screen (SETTINGS, then Sound credits) names each source. The synths need no samples and are all present. For the whole library, including the grand pianos and guitars, install the desktop app.

How it runs here, and who makes what

The program files are the ones in the project's v0.5.3 release, checked against that archive's checksums; our only additions are a small host page that loads the app and tells this page when it has started, and the shortened sound index. The corresponding source is the project's repository at that tag. Honeydew is made by its own contributors and includes plugin and FLP code from Lemon Studio; AudioSaw hosts a copy under the GPL and is not affiliated with either project. If you want a simpler multitrack editor for audio files you already have, with nothing to learn, that is the AudioSaw editor; for a studio modelled on Pro Tools, see SoundCraft.