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.
Bismarck bs-16i / Questions
I would like to venture into downloading sound fonts. Bismarck bs-16i seems to be the recommended app at the price point of $7.99. Btw, this app is now AUv3.
Questions: if I am using it as a midi plugin do I need to purchase the hi res engine and the 128 note polyphony inapps?
I looked to download the Salamander piano and it does not seem to offer an iOS download. What is the correct site to find this option?
What other sites offer good free downloads. Doug recommends RKhive and it looks pretty good.
Thanks!
Comments
http://beats.codenamehippie.com/samples/SoundFrontz/
and
http://freedrumkits.net/
both have quite a number of free soundfonts
There's a new AUv3 SoundFont player called "SoundFonts AU" that's also worth looking into with fewer bells and whistles that BS-16i. BS-16i can be a bit tricky to load up a specific SF2 package. "SoundFonts AU" opens with a list of all sound fonts loaded and once you pick one the instruments are all listed on the right. Simple to use and very stable. BS-16i has more features to play multi-track MIDI files and assign instruments to 16 tracks and provides a 16-track mixer.
The easiest to acquire Salamander comes from:
https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/
There are many packagings of it there bacause in the history of sound fonts they included dozens of instrument and these packages are like that... look for the Nice-Keys-Extreme packages but most will have the Yamaha C5.
Once they are on your iPad use the share icon (up arrow in a box) and find the "Open in BS-16i" or "Open in SoundFonts" if you get that sound font player.
@McD cannot find Soundfonts AU on the AppStore.
Look for "SoundFonts" and do NOT get "SoundFonts Pro". Check the text to insure it's the AUv3 product.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soundfonts/id1453325077
It's $2 from B-Ray Software.
@LinearLineman
get both
+1 b-ray got great preset handling quick easy just drop fonts in folder and go.
+1 and bundled sounds are GOOD.
(a tip in settings; ”play a note” on select. speed stuff up even more.)
Bs16 got more control over sound, like reverb,chorus and attack release, filters. A built in 16 multi timbral part mixer for split layr style arrange..
edit;only in standalone! auv3 only monotimbral.
Doug got vid on it
-1 preset handling suk
-1 bundled gm font is horrible (to put it mildly)
BS-16 is much less CPU hungry. Even with its FX, filter and envelope features.
I tried both with the same Salamader piano soundfont in AUM playing the same chords.
BS-16 used 50% less according to AUM.
@jolico , with the same sf2 loaded?
remember b-ray is uncapped uses apples own sampler code... no need for ”unlock pro”
b ray thread here https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/37459/soundfonts-by-b-ray-software-updated-with-auv3-support
Ha!
I bought SoundFonts Pro the week it came out. It seems to be very well designed and feature rich, but I must confess that I have not used it since that initial week.
Yes. The same salamander sf2 imported into both.
Thanks @McD. Will probably get both. What about the inapps on Bismark? High res engine and 128 polyphony Asia @noob kindly suggests.
One of the things I like about Bs-16i is that you can mimic some old instruments that do not exist on iOS, in particular the Rocksichord, by making use of the fact that it is polytimbral.
You can load multiple different soundfonts to play simultaneously vary their levels and assign different MIDI channels for each.
Admittedly the Rocksichord is a niche instrument though!
As for you question about the IAPs: I don’t know if they’re essential, I just bought them anyway! Just play with the app and if you’re happy with it could probably ignore them.
This site is also a great source of free, but more unusual Soundfonts:
https://sites.google.com/site/despianosvirtuels/
High res is always good. I wonder if that changes the comments on CPU usage?
128 note polyphony would be important if you use it as a MIDi DAW and play MIDI files
with a lot of tracks. I never tried but it might be a good recording app for a keyboard player. Since it's AUv3 you can run it in DAW's or just plumb up it's MIDI channels into
a DAW.
I bought BS-16i both IAP's couple years back... mostly to thank the developer for providing
a General MIDI capable, sound font loading app for $8. Auria Pro has these features
by the way along with its' complete DAW and FX features. It's Aria sound "sample playback" engine loads SF2 and SFZ's and can provide "disk streaming" for the largest sample sets.
Thanks for all the good info, guys!
It's good to notice that when you use BS-16i as AUv3 you can only play one instrument per instance!
@Harro ah yes good point, its a complete beast when in standalone
@jolico damn ur right... bs16 runs smoother now than before..
btw got a boatload of sf2s but dunno where to upload em for sharing
Shouldn’t the patch storage site have a soundfont section?
Or don’t they count as patches?
@McD, how long does the Salamander download take? I realize it is almost a gig, but my circle just goes round and round.
I'm surprised you guys use bs-16i with large piano sound fonts, haven't you found any limits when using it as an AUv3?
I haven't even tried that yet, did everything large inside AudioLayer by now.
bs-16i seems to work quite well with smaller sound fonts though.
b-ray handles big fonts just fine tho on 2gb ipad gen6
I don't trust it in a DAW but for playback it seems fine. I suspect it loads a max of 16 instruments from the sf2 package. It does complain when RAM is too low. If you just want to hear the Salamander Piano in AUM it seems to work. If you throw some manic MIDI at it then it will probably fall over trying to render a lot of samples into it's audio buffer.
So, I tend to use commercial apps for anything with serious piano quality needed:
1. Ravenscroft 275 but it won't co-exist with a lot of other apps in AUM.
2. iGrand when I want better sound, good stability and more tracks in AUM.
3. Retro Piano maybe for a recognizable piano in a complex track.
4. SoundFonts loaded with one of dozens of SF2 based pianos. Some of the tiny Akai and such pianos are fine to cut through a complex mix and not fall over.
I just added CPM Piano and it's great... haven't really tested it for scaling yet but the
internal Grand and Jazz Pianos sound good. Hopefully, as an older app it's stable and can
co-exist in a complex project.
I had some nice pianos in AudioLayer that I cloned using SynthJacker from the expensive
AUv3 instances. But I ran short of disk space and deleted them but they sounded good and were stable. I found an SFZ Felt Piano at the PianoBook.com that installs into AudioLayer but needed some hand edits to fix dropped notes in the layers. Felt Pianos are very cool...
like a soft mallet dampened vibraphone... almost a well pitched Kalimba.
heads up, i got a page up for sf2 sharing, try here https://sites.google.com/view/n00bs/nobs
will try to upload more single fonts -no copyright needed fonts ofc
Not to look a gift horse... but SielOrch seems to be broken in SoundFonts. Maybe someone else can test and comment.
Playing with the Nice-Keys.sf2 in BS-16i it has some issues with RAM shortages... rebooting made it work again but it seems fragile and changing he selected piano helps. It load 2 instances of pianos on the default page so I re-directed the 2nd instrument to something on the long list that seemed like it might be smaller. That gave a bit more runtime before another MIDI issue surfaced.
I think Pianos in individually wrapped sf2's might be a good way to go. Polyphony on a Windows system can do that but then there's the large scale distribution issue to solve.
thnx @McD gonna have a chk.. omg it sounds horrible wtf haha
ok more stuff added time for a break
So, this gift horse did need some dental work? Orthodontics or a root canal?
Who remembers Mr. ED and how they got his tongue to move so it looked like he was talking? They put something in his mouth to irritate his gums.
"Hey, Wilbur."
But that horse died rich... TV re-runs.
Pharmaceutical grade cocaine
If you’re mainly after the piano sounds I’d scroll further down the list to the PIANO section for no 3, Version A, Yamaha-C5-Salamader-JN-v5.1. You’re less likely to run into RAM issues with this one as it contains just the 15-layer Salamander (and variants) without the additional instrument sounds.
It’s highly unlikely you’ll need the the extra polyphony IAP even with heavy pedal-down playing. I don’t have the hi-res engine IAP but I’m curious to know what it does exactly. @McD ?
The inbuilt reverb is sub par so turn it’s dial to the left and substitute something better. I find the the resonance layer of the main preset to be too noisy so I use the ‘Yam C5 no res’ one instead. It’s a highly playable piano.
The developer's web site states:
More headroom for the audio signal dropping the noise floor and allowing max bit-depth, I guess. I haven't really done any A/B comparisons because (I'll mention again) I use Ravenscroft when I want a great piano. I also just pulled the trigger on the Crudebytes CPM piano and it's nice too. Can we have enough pianos? There are 2 more IAP pianos in the CMP product and I also have met of the Colossus Pianos and they sound great but are a pain to:
They are on a par with a decent Digital Piano but not as good as a good Digital Piano, I suspect.
The polyphony would be important for extremely complicated multi-track MIDI file playback but would probably only run with shitty GM sf2 libraries from the 00's and not these current packagings of quality sampled instruments.
its ded Jim” ok try now.
https://sites.google.com/view/n00bs/nobs
What the heck is this? I haven’t used bs-16 for several months. Now it simply can not load most of my soundfonts. I had zero issue with these sf2’s in the past.
Any idea?
Something has changed. It needn’t have been bs-16i.