Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
What is Loopy Pro? — Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.
Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
How do you record two ipads playing together?
Wondering if anyone here with an ipad band/collaborative music project, that has a slick, easy way of recording music that you are making with two people with ipads, or one busy person with two ipads. On one of the ipads, rather than a third device.
The Ableton Link has made it easy to sync up the two ipads, but then when you get something sounding good, and want to record it, it isn't obvious how. The ways I've done it are clunky, the first is the hardware way, digging out and setting up an audio interface on the recording ipad, and plugging the headphone jack into the audio in, and recording it like any audio source.
Second way was to record internally in garageband on the other ipad, and then send the project with air drop to the other ipad, and so on back and forth. Actually was the one approach I tried that worked alright, just takes time each person recording their parts one at a time, and I believe garageband can only record one track at a time?
I remember trying to use the recorder in AUM, and air dropping the files to the other ipad but something didn't work right. And it got complicated to use AUM like a DAW, with no timeline.
I tried to use Loopy but i believe i couldn't transfer the sessions, only the bounced down audio. I might have been missing something.
Some kind of wireless streaming would be great, if there was a way to correct the inevitable latency. I vaguelly remember there was some program that did wireless recording, that was really smart, and recorded on the sending device and then sent it over to the host device, as soon as the recording was finished, so there were no glitches, and the timeline was perfectly synced up, after the fact.
Thanks for any ideas!
Comments
You can use AUM and send the output for each track you're playing into a track of a DAW like Cubasis. You could route whatever audio you wanted to monitor in the sessions to the headphone output connected to an audio mixer which takes the headphone output of each iPad and mixes them together. You'd be in sync, hearing the same parts that are already recorded, could play your respective parts live, and simultaneously recorded them.
This way you can continue to add tracks, mix them, freeze tracks when needed and not have to do any of the back and forth transfer of tracks until you're ready for the final mixing of the song. It would also allow you to balance the processing load between the two iPads making the most of the iOS resources.
Trying to send audio to the other iPad while simultaneously receiving audio from the other iPad isn't really feasible on a digital data transfer basis as far as I know. Even if it were possible, it'd cut into the processing power you'd have available for live play.
oldschool version:
both iPads go into an old Tascam 4 or 8 track cassette deck (Portastudio 244/424/488 etc)
in case you have quality concerns: this was cut on an 8 track 238 machine, the 19" version
(not by me...)
http://elsewhere.bandcamp.com/album/mrs-oscillator-her-pocket-calculator-limited-vinyl
(the album is also a great benchmark for synths as it's a 100% analog recording)
modern approach:
with an iConnectAudio4+ you can connect both iPad to 1 interface (lightning)
setup an extra routing that feeds the sum to a virtual input
record this input on your iPad of choice with whatever app is preferred
(there's audio and midi communication/sync between both devices)
cheers, Tom
ps: wow, I just linked the page and it embedded a player...
http://musicappblog.com/apollo-updates/
Here's an example of what one half of the setup could look like where they've got an electric guitar connected and are playing drums with Patterning along with some vocals that were already recorded in Cubasis.
Presumably your friend could have a synth track already recorded and they're playing bass. You could adjust the levels of the tracks you're recording live to suit your playing needs by adjusting the output going to the headphone jack in AUM.
Each of you could hear the vocals, drums, synth, electric guitar, and bass as you're playing/recording via the audio mix of the output from both iPads. You could add other parts just as backing tracks either in the DAW or in AUM.
Alternatively, if you already have a USB audio interface you could route the output from each iPad to it and route the analog out from the USB Audio interface to speakers or a headphone splitter if you don't want to get a 4 channel or better analog mixer. A passive mixer could be especially useful for these purposes as it doesn't require any power and has minimal distortion. All of the recordings would be digital on their own track without needing any digital to analog to digital conversions as @Processaurus did using the first clunky hardware way.
Very Carefully
You can use an iConnectAUDIO2+ at a minimum. I showed doing it in my review, although using 2 iPads is not officially supported (it is on the iConnectAUDIO4+). You can have something running on one of the iPads, and say, Auria Pro - or AUM or whatever - and multiple other apps running on the other iPad and record all of them together.
http://www.musicinclusive.com/blog/the_iconnectaudio2___a_review/
Has anyone been sucessfully using Apollo Sound Injector? I wonder if latency can be kept to a minimum, so synchopated things don't get sloppy sounding? If there was a noticeable lag, one could still compensate by slightly delaying the local audio. Are there any precise, short utility type delays, like the Sample Delay in Logic, to align audio?
@InfoCheck thanks for the writeup, what you are talking about is how to do monitoring, but how are you recording the two ipads together, when you want to mix it? For quick ideas and fun stuff, that comes quickly. I thought about soldering a passive 2 stereo summing mixer thing, from a couple 1/8" cables and some resistors, and recording onto a Zoom handheld recorder, but it would be nice to be able to have the recordings in Audioshare, to name them and organize, email, etc. Also the ipad stuff sounds especially good when it is kept digital the whole way through recording.
@MusicInclusive the nice thing about the iconnect stuff is that it actually works, as many of us bitterly know, many utility apps merely make promises to work, but at the moment I'm interested if there is a software way of doing it. Be nice not to have to buy a box, and have another thing to plug in, because it takes away some of the portability, and simplicity. I'm worried that that might be the only solution...
@Telefunky straight to four track is pretty cute. Time to dust off some high bias cassettes.
@Processaurus I think there are trade offs with whatever method you choose. My suggestion would still mean eventually adding newly recorded tracks to the master DAW project (essentially copying recorded tracks on one iPad to the other). The two iPads will be in sync via Link and recordings will have the timeline preserved in the DAW.
To make the setup clearer, here's a diagram.
Passive mixers are relatively inexpensive and can used in a variety of situations where you want to incorporate analog sound sources into your mix. They can also have attenuation capabilities so that the input or output signal is not too hot. A DIY solution is certainly feasible but may not be worth your while versus purchasing one.
Thanks for the diagram, mixing a recorded track means transferring tracks from the DAWs on each ipad. How that works is important. Can cubasis air drop seperate audio file tracks? I believe garage band can only export project files, and bounced mixes. Def. interested in the most streamlined solution, since it is for sketches and ideas, as opposed to a painstaking album created over months (which i would use the computer for any extensive mixing and editing).
AUM acts as a headphone mixer and Link to IAA sync adapter, to get the DAWs to be synced together?
never mind the sync if both people listen to the same monitor/source while sketching
a groove might even be slightly off the grid... or rather that's often what it's called 'groove' for
if you have a DAW for final processing anyway, you can still move stuff on the timeline later
( or audio quantize or whatever applies)
cheers, Tom
Couldn't you just use session jam in GarageBand on both iPads?
AUM acts as you've said plus it also sends the same audio from each iPad to the DAW on the iPad where it's being recorded onto a track of your DAW. You can set different levels for the audio going to the mixer versus the audio being sent to the DAW to suit your needs.
To add to the master track, just send a copy of the project which has the new recordings you want to add by selecting it in the media bay and email it, or use Dropbox, or some other iCloud Drive app (Google Drive, AudioShare) to send it to the other iPad.
Use open in to open the project in Cubasis and select it from the Media Bay. For a recorded track(s), select the regions(s), copy, open the master project, add a track, and paste the selected regions in. Cubasis will automatically create additional tracks if you selected regions to copy and paste from multiple tracks.
Cubasis zips the projects for export and will open zipped projects and put them in the media bay using open in.
In AudioShare, you can use AirDrop to transfer the zipped Cubasis project to the other iPad and open in Cubasis.
Woah!! That's the ticket! It seems like it is working, the master ipad automatically collects the slave's recordings and assembles them on the timeline.
@infocheck thanks for the write up. If it must be cubasis that seems like the labrynth of ios file sharing one would need to take.
I bought this:
http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&alt=web&id=272256057924&globalID=EBAY-GB
the other day for £4.
Combined with a cck you can route the audio of iPad2 into ipad1 - then use AUM to mix and record whatever you like.
Use LINK between apps on the 2 iPads.
Stick the result into MTDaw for editing if you like.
^ Matt, how is the quality on that DAC? I always wondered about those cheap things
The Cubasis setup/transfer is less complicated than it seems. If you're recording a bunch of tracks and using MIDI too, it becomes routine after you've done it a few times. You can also save space on your devices by archiving your Cubasis projects on Dropbox, Google Drive or some other cloud storage system, or WiFi drive transfer them to a local storage option and bring them back should you ever need them. Auria may have similar capabilities but I haven't really looked into that.
I'll definitely look into @BiancaNeve option of using GB jam session. If GB ever adds more robust MIDI and effect options plus being able to route audio chains with it in a more flexible manner, I'd use it more often. Since it was so late to the Audiobus party, I've gotten used to using other options which don't include GB and haven't followed up on discovering the full potential of the updated GB.
I'm not sure if this is what you need, but you may give a look at Haq Attaq in the soundtestrooom.com. In one of the recent videos he shows the use of a little Behringer device that he used to send the audio from an iPad to another. Very inexpensive, at least.
Sounds ok to me. It's taking audio out of the other iPads headphone socket anyway - so that's not digital. I doubt it makes things worse.
I bought it so I could take the audio while performing on my iPad and directly feed it into my iPhone shooting video of the performance. So no need to apply the audio afterwards.
Cool, seems like an alternative to the Behringer uca202 and it is so small. I might buy one
I have a uca202. But the leads and the bulk of it seemed unnecessary for carrying around so when I saw this for £4 thought it was worth a punt.
Other uses:
So, I have a UCA 202 (still a wiry puzzle to me as I've rarely used it) and am wondering how I can leverage it (or IF I can) to record from the Playground thingie talked about here into another iPad...
Or is this just dumb and unreasonable? Thoughts?
EDIT: Have found out that you can record a live mix at least of whatever you play and export either an m4a or wav of your 'performance'.