FL Studio 12 is compressing my old beats

For every project, keep track of an FL studio version and patch number.  When you next want to use a feature present in a new version of FL studio (and really any time you perform an FL studio update) you update the number to be the lowest version number available.  Create a VM instance with FL studio installed in it - that exact version and patch number of FL studio - any time you need to update it in order to get some features you want in your new project.  

This way any time you are working on a project, keep track of the desired FL studio version number and open the project in that VM instance.  Make sure to have a network share folder mounted to your FL studio projects folder, for easy access from any VM

If you want you could even make some powershell or bash scripts called "launchflvm <versionNumber>" (make sure to have it in your %PATH% or $PATH) which automatically opens the FL studio project in this directory within the VM, but in order for this to work there would have to be some way for a host to send a region of memory from the string (containing the file location on the network share if the FL studio project) passed to the over the CLI to the host of that VM instance a string some startup script to capture it.  I'm sure there is a way, but determining whether that is the case is left as an exercise for the reader because I'm too lazy to check the website for whatever virtualization software you are using.  

Anyway this would work and eliminate this problem entirely, all with about 10 minutes of setup cost, maybe 10 more for the VM images' startup scripts.  Enjoy the time savings!