You NEED the full version, trust me. Remember, if you buy online you get free upgrades for LIFE, so this is a good investment. With the full version you get Piano Roll, automation, ASIO support, and internal controllers. If you're confused about anything, just visit fruitloops.com.
The Piano Roll is real simple. Basically you have a grid that travels horizontally. Each row represents a piano key, each column represents a moment in time (a beat, measure, etc). Now to play a C5 on the first beat of the first measure, you simply click in the appropriate grid space and a cute little bar will be drawn, representing the note. To sustain the note longer, just grab the edge of the bar and stretch it. To move the note to a different position, just grab it and move it. To change the start time of a note by a value smaller than the grid, just double click it and adjust the start time. To make a chord, just draw several notes that occur on the same beat. Very simple. Now underneath the piano view, is where you can modify the velocity and other settings for each note/chord. It'll be obvious once you see it.
Can you work without the piano roll and save the money? No. Well, yes, but you don't want to. You basically have to have an instance for each finger that you're going to play simultaneously. So if you insert a synth and want to play a 4 note chord, you have to insert 3 MORE synths and pitch each one using the little keyboard menu thing. This quickly becomes unbearable. Then if you're using samples, man the number of seperate channels you'll need grows very quickly. What a pain! Plus you're stuck with the stupid beat editor which is only good for beats. AND you have to break all your synth/piano work up into patterns. Yuck.
If you want to hear an example of some piano stuff that I did with fruity loops using the piano roll editor, then check out my tune Thursday at my site
http://www.slackmaster2000.com . That song is through a lofi plug so the piano sound quality is of course intentionally degraded. Oh, and I used piano samples for that one...now that I have a VSTi piano synth I don't have to use samples and have much more control. "Saturday" and "Sunday" were both done exclusively in fruity loops using all samples collected here and there around the net. Then the semi-natural drums in "Monday" were done in fruity loops as well.
Slackmaster 2000