FL Studio to Ableton, without bouncing stems

Open the project in Live with its tracks still tracks.

Yerk converts an FL Studio project (.flp) into an Ableton Live set (.als) on macOS. Tracks, patterns, tempo, instruments and samples carry across, and FL Studio effects are mapped to their closest Ableton devices. It reads the project file directly, so nothing is rendered to audio. Built from analysis of 558 real FL Studio projects.

Why moving a project between DAWs is still manual

FL Studio and Ableton Live store a project in two unrelated formats, and there has never been a shared standard between them. So the workaround every producer knows is the same one from fifteen years ago: bounce each track to a WAV, drag the stems into a fresh Live set, and rebuild the arrangement, the instruments and the effect chains by ear. You keep the audio and lose everything that made it editable. For a collaborator who works in Live, or for your own switch, that is hours per project, and the reason most projects never move at all.

What carries across

Yerk reads the .flp itself, not a rendered copy, and writes an Ableton Live 12 set. From the FL project it carries:

  • Tracks, with their names, so the session is recognisable when it opens.
  • Patterns, placed as clips in the arrangement.
  • Tempo, so nothing drifts.
  • Instruments and samples, the sound sources behind each track, with sample references resolved to the files on disk.
  • Effects, mapped to the nearest Ableton device. Fruity Parametric EQ becomes EQ Eight, Fruity Compressor becomes Compressor, delays become Delay, and so on across the stock FL effect set.

Where an FL effect has no exact counterpart in Live, Yerk chooses the closest device and marks the conversion as an approximation rather than silently leaving the slot empty. What it could not carry is named, so you know what to check before you send the session to anyone.

Third-party plugins

A VST or AU used in FL Studio is referenced by the project, not embedded in it. The same rule applies in Live. If a plugin is installed on the Mac that opens the converted set, Live loads it; if not, Live shows the missing-device placeholder exactly as it would for any of its own projects. Yerk cannot install plugins for you, and neither can anything else.

How it works

  1. Point Yerk at the FL Studio project you want to move.
  2. Choose where the Ableton set should be written.
  3. Open the resulting .als in Ableton Live 12. The tracks, clips and devices are there.

The conversion runs entirely on your Mac. The project is never uploaded to a server, which matters when the project is unreleased.

Built from 558 real projects

Before writing the converter, we collected 558 real FL Studio projects from working producers and catalogued what actually breaks when they move: which effects have no equivalent, how sample paths go stale, where pattern lengths and time signatures disagree. The converter is built around that list, not around the file-format documentation.

What is next

FL Studio to Ableton Live is the transfer that ships today. Logic Pro, Pro Tools and Cubase are next, in that order. If you need one of those, join the waitlist and say so. The order is set by who asks.

Moving a project is one half of the problem; keeping it safe is the other. Yerk also keeps hash-verified, versioned backups of your projects, in whichever DAW they live. For how this compares with online converters, see alternatives.

Join the waitlist