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.
Raspberry PI - are you using it for your music purposes?
I have two raspberry pi 4 for development projects and I am wondering if I could use them as gadgets in my music environment.
Anyone using a raspberry pi for something like this?
Comments
I tinker with some friends.
What do you wonder to build? There are some nice projects out there...
Warning: Don't even start if you don't have enough spare time! 😅
Some OS images optimized for audio and/or MIDI:
https://blokas.io/patchbox-os/
https://www.samplerbox.org/faq
https://github.com/gbevin/erpiam
https://www.midi.org/articles-old/elk-releases-open-source-version-of-audio-operating-system-and-development-kit-for-raspberry-pi
Also, watch this (links included in description):
I use one as MIDI to Bluetooth adapter for my guitar amp so that I can control it from my iPad.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that I have Pianoteq running on, and sometimes use it as the VST for playing on my digital piano keyboard.
I also have enabled midi host functionality, so I can plug devices into the Pi (or its USB hub) and have the Pi route the midi among them; instructions I used are here: https://neuma.studio/rpi-as-midi-host.html
I also at one point was using rtpmidi on the Pi (same as or compatible with Core Midi) to wirelessly (using wifi not bluetooth) receive midi from my ipad (directing ipad midi to network session). For this I used the rtpmidi implementation here: https://github.com/davidmoreno/rtpmidid , which has binaries that work on raspbian here: https://github.com/davidmoreno/rtpmidid/releases
I did try to get Bluetooth midi going, seemed close to having it working at one point, but not quite. The bluez bluetooth alsa implementation that raspbian uses does not come with support for bluetooth midi compiled in. So you have to configure for it and recompile yourself. I wasted quite a few hours trying to do this and never got it to work. Then I tried rtpmidi and got midi working over wifi in a matter of minutes. Some people have been able to get Bluetooth midi working, though, not sure what my problems were, quite a bit of confusion regarding bluez versions. . . .
Regarding using RPi as a synth, there's "Zynthian" project, which involves making your Pi into a pretty polished little external synth: https://zynthian.org/ You can buy the hardware/kit directly from them, or just use their open source software and build the synth part yourself however you want. Software is here on github: https://github.com/zynthian
A Zynthian video, an old one, is here:
@rs2000 Patchbox looks cool. Need to try that.
Thanks @hes for linking to Zynthian, had it in mind but forgot the name 😊
I have patchbox with a pisound installed on something now, but I've done more with Arduino via BLE MIDI.
I wish it were easier to power a Raspberry Pi with an onboard battery, and that they could withstand power interruption without risk of corrupting their file system.
I would dearly love to see a Raspberry Pi Mozaic script interpreter from @brambos. All it would need to do is be able to read scripts exported from iOS Mozaic and to process midi in and out.
How do you like Patchbox? I have Raspberry 2B, sitting around so could be a fun exercise.
No GUI support in your thinking? I suppose we could just send in CC's and use physical controllers or MIDI in from an iPad/iPhone for controls and save the GUI requirements.
I'd pay dearly for Mozaic on my Mac. I have MIDIfire and it was great to code/test on the Mac and then copy to the iPad. All the tools are there for the rapid wrangling of text on the Mac. Even the keyboards for the iPads are a pain to use... too small and "vi" muscle memory persists. Using / to find...
patchbox is ok. It can be a fun way to run some PureData from a thumb drive.
I have seen audio images that were mounted read-only (If I remember correctly, Samplerbox does that) so a sudden power cut won't do much harm.
Earlier Raspi boards could be hardware hacked (do away with USB and Ethernet ports) to save power but I don't know if the 3 and 4 models can be treated in a similar way.
A large 2 amp power bank should work though (not onboard of course, the Raspberry Pi is not built for that).
nothing like German accent for synth tech vids, its like that language was built for it
No, I'm thinking of it purely as a processor for midi in and out, mainly for hardware. I'm picturing a DIY hardware controller with unlimited potential from the script engine.
Just a geek dream. Not practical. I get these flareups from time to time. Still tryin' to find a reason / excuse for getting a Pi. So far I can find nothing to convince (fool) myself that it's a practical investment in time and money.
Regarding Mozaic on Raspberry Pi, isn't there some Python (or Perl?, Go?, Ruby?) midi library that would enable something similar to Mozaic scripting, but in much more powerful environment? I would actually prefer something like that, since the Mozaic language is pretty limiting. Some library in Python that abstracts things to a Mozaic-level of simplicity would be more flexible and still pretty easy to use.
It's hard to tell what's out there. First thing I come across that looks like a possibility is: http://trac.chrisarndt.de/code/wiki/python-rtmidi
No way I'd try to recreate the stuff going on under the hood in Mozaic. I think it's a vast underestimation of what's going on there to consider that it could be replicated without a huge amount of work, no matter how many libraries one relied on.
PureData can do it.
OK, yeh, that is interesting.
I think I'd still prefer the workflow of developing / prototyping in Mozaic on the iPad, then downloading those scripts to hardware. But Pd is definitely something new I hadn't considered.
I'm not sure how much of an underestimation I'm making. At least not for the part of Mozaic that I'd be interested in duplicating. An event loop for midi messages would not seem to be that hard to implement. (e.g., https://github.com/patrickkidd/pyrtmidi ) Then you've got the entire language (e.g., Python) pre-existing to use however you want.
I would be skipping entirely the gui parts of Mozaic, which I would not be interested in trying to duplicate on an RPi. So having Python processing like I'm thinking would be beter in some ways, worse in others.
I also think, if just having more powerful scripting environment is the goal, Midifire's OSC bridge to Pythonista from Mozaic might be a good solution. Midi could be routed from Mozaic through Midfire's OSC bridge to Pythonista script for processing, then results sent back through Midifire to Mozaic. To some extent this would still be working within Mozaic, (gui and event processing) but using Pythonista script as back end to do the processing grunt work. Looks feasible to me if you imagine that working with Midfire's OSC Exchange module. I'm not sure what latencies would be, but seems like they'd be better than what you'd get from adding an RPi to the mix:
https://audeonic.boards.net/thread/734/adding-scripting-languages-using-midifire
This thread reminds me I want to get Midifire and play around to see how well a little Moziac/Midifire/Pythonista proof-of-concept setup works.
My main complaint about Mozaic, though, is the practical difficulty of editing the files in a decent editor (manually copying back and forth), and not having an easy way to use git for versioning. I've seen comments that Bram intends to somehow add feature of having the scripts in text files accessible in a "Files" app directory which would solve most of my issues.
i see a lot time has to be spend for this. i there an out of the box image for the bluetooth midi stuff?
edit: ok, found something here...
https://neuma.studio/rpi-midi-complete.html
Looks interesting. Trying to wrap my head around it.
Anyone tried Audio OS by Elk?
https://elk.audio/audio-os/
Here is the git repo
https://github.com/elk-audio/elk-pi
I am very interested, but have never owned a RPi.
Using 5G to jam with others connected via Audio OS seems promising
https://elk.audio/5g/
@mojozart Nice re PD. That's the use case, I'm thinking. Keeps me from buying an Organelle, a bit longer.
I have one but have yet to figure out a way to incorporate it into my workflow
From looking at the 'instructions' page link on that page, it seems the images may still need to have their bluez bluetooth modules recompiled to support bluetooth midi. Not sure. The strange thing is that those images appear to be recent (Feb 2020 Buster Raspbian). But the linked instructions (https://neuma.studio/rpi-midi-complete.html) are for an older version of Raspbian, and in particular the github project the instructions link to for bluetooth midi is over three years old (https://github.com/oxesoft/bluez ). There have been many changes to bluez bluetooth in that time, and if you poke around on the web you'll find many people have had problems with getting bluetooth midi working on the RPi recently. McLaren labs has some info on how they recently got bluetooth midi working on a Pi: https://mclarenlabs.com/blog/2020/03/22/update-korg-microkey-air-37-bluetooth-midi-keyboard-with-raspberry-pi4-and-buster/
I'd say if it works smoothly for you getting bluetooth midi working, great. If you find yourself having problems and wasting time, then maybe check into using rtpmidi (which I believe is lower latency anyway), using either github project I linked in earlier post, or maybe the $5 McLaren Labs version of rtpmidi: https://mclarenlabs.com/#rtpmidi
Since I got the MacBook Pro and Catalina, I use Textastic on the Mac coupled with AirPlay for shared clipboard to the iPad. Type the script on the Mac,
<cmd-a><cmd-c>, tap the code in Mozaic,<cmd-a><cmd-v> upload. Scripts are automatically synced via iCloud to Textastic on the iPad in case I feel like editing there. Its quick enough and easy enough for anything I could ever imagine wanting to do in Mozaic. I don't care about git for Mozaic scripts, but I imagine that would be easy enough to do with this setup.I'll trade the maximum two minutes a month extra I spend copying and pasting for the man-months of Bram's time to build a deluxe editor any day.
Not gonna get into the technical details of why I think it's impractical to replicate Mozaic's event driven innards with python, etc. Suffice to say I'm not interested in that route, but would be happy to see anyone prove me wrong.
Bomebox for those wanting midi wizardry box.
Also check otem rellik looping thing I post often (I’m on the iPhone so copypaste lazy bastard am I)
Also max gen to juce into elk.audio as I pointed in other topic too...
Tomorrow I will drop links and vids.
PureData (PD) is great
Those videos really help
Also there is a very nice modular synth running in PD
https://www.automatonism.com/the-software
I do something similar with iVim on iPad. It's fine if you want to transfer to the editor, do some heavy edits, then transfer back. If you find a little typo once you've got it back in Mozaic, though, or if you want to make many small iterative changes, testing along the way, there's a lot of friction going back and forth. At least with the way I do things, not everyone has same editing habits.
Not having version control, that feels like I'm in the dark ages.
They have a disk image that you can just burn without doing any recompiling. The long instructions are for people that want to do that but there is also a quick install which is basically: "download the disk image, copy it to your SD Card and go." I've done it both ways.