it sounds different because it isn't mixed or mastered.
you take a piece of beat from here, you take a piece of bass from there, you pop them into the little square do-hicky, you loop it and you're done.
that's just not going to work.
here's why.
you've got to get those loop pieces to sit together in the mix such that when you play them on any stereo it still sounds good. its not going to sound the same, but it should still sound good.
you've got to carve out space for the bass and kick so that they don't stack on each other. you've got to be careful with your instrumentation selection so that you give each instrument space to breath in the mix. you might get away with them stacking on your monitors but when you play that same track on your CD player, it just can't handle the load.
i guess what i'm saying is. you can use fruity loops or whatever to your hearts creative content, but in the end you've still got to know how to mix (Volume [h], Panning [w], EQ [l], Compress, Limit, and fx) the loops pieces into a song.
then, when you've got a group of songs. you've got to master them so that they all sound like a cohesive unit.
As long as I'm ranting lets also talk about song selection. Your songs should flow from one to the other. Notice how all of the songs on Kanye West's CD seem to vibe together until 'Through the Wire'??? It comes out of left field. It was a decent song but it just doesn't fit. The production quality was different from the rest of the CD, the perceived volume level (mastering) is different from the rest of the CD.
