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.
Comments
+1 I was going to request the same. Also, is it possible to enter notes in the piano roll grid when touching the vertical piano keys on the left? Like this at 13:30 in case it doesn’t start there:
Related to above. Step recording would be great bonus, though LK pretty much covers everything I need now. 🤘
Honestly, I think this would be totally wrong. Again this would lead more in the direction of a DAW where you have MIDI sequencing and audio tracks in one program. I think what is so great about iOS music making is the DAWless approach with AUM.
I prefer to have small apps that are very focused on one single purpose, that do one thing but do that very well. Strive for functional completeness, high stability and maturity. If an app keeps the focus, these goals can be reached much easier. Important is to have an ecosystem where you can combine all these little apps with each other in a very flexible manner. Then you can always build the solution you need with these small focused tools. I’m in the IT industry and there we call this the UNIX philosophy.
This is the reason why AUM is so stable and Cubasis, Zenbeats, BM3 and the like are more likely to crash. They are feature monsters with a code base that is very hard to maintain and over time contains more and more ‘technical debt’. The feature monsters force you to do things in their way and in the end of the day they all still miss some features you need. Cubasis can not be MIDI controlled, Zenbeats can’t record AUv3 midi generators, etc.
Nonetheless I agree that the iOS DAWless approach is missing a solution for audio tracks. 4pockets MultiTrack seems to not really work well for most people here on the forum. A good solution for that would be very much appreciated. But for audio clips many people use EG Pulse or BeatHawk.
Seems like a fair point 🤔
Meaning we definitely need an AUv3 audio clip launcher. I would say EG Pulse and BeatHawk both have different core functionalities. So it‘s more or less a hack to make them launch a bank of audio clips.
Hey @sinosoidal if you have the capacities at Imaginando maybe you could develop an audio clip launcher that communicates seamlessly with LK. 😋 I‘m sure a lot of people would be really happy.
The upcoming Loopy Pro solves the audio clip launching issue and LK could send midi to trigger the clips
Audio Layer with it's disk streaming is my preferred way of using audio files with LK since there is basically no file length limit.
Only if it's optional. And preferably can be enabled/disabled from a button directly in the piano roll. There are times this is helpful, but often I don't want a bunch of noise happening when I'm selecting or moving notes.
I don't see how it would work for multiple notes unless they were overlapping in the timeline? Imagine the mess if you selected all notes in a big pattern then moved them.
Maybe we could only hear the note we grabbed while moving notes, not the entire selection and not while making the selection.
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Just came here to say how great LK works with Ableton.The features set is just perfect, and it keeps my hands off the computer keyboard.
I was thinking about buying a new keyboard controller that had transport controls, but since I already had LK, I just saved a ton of money.
I wish I had set it up sooner.
BeatHawk also does disk streaming. About EG Pulse I don’t know but I would guess so.
Yeah that’s true. It works but its a bit hacky. Anyway, I prefer to have audio clips on an audio track and work with the audio directly. Then you can easily cut and slice things up and rearrange and edit the clips in-place instead of managing a battery of clips that you trigger by MIDI.
But... as LK is generally a MIDI clip launcher with tracks and scenes, so it suits to this style of work to have also audio clips. I guess this is what you say that its too hacky with the apps mentioned before. At least I gave up on this at some point.
Just tried this too. Pretty great actually. Thanks for the tip. The new clip features makes this awesome.
This is a really interesting question and we have been requested many times but I believe it's just not the right time to even think about it.
@krassmann has made really solid comments about technical debt. LK has already a big technical debt and this is what we are trying to do now: paying the debt...
Adding audio to LK is possible but it will brings us a lot of more problems and stress when we have a big technical debt already.
Right now we are cleaning up the house (we have been feeding the features monster for the last 8 months) and we still have a long list of features that you have been requesting, performance improvements as well as user interface and interaction polishing:
The list is long and keeps growing every week with your feedback. Are we forgetting something?
And of course, we don't work exclusively on LK. We are working on new stuff as well as maintaining all our other software.
That‘s what I assumed. I think it’s better for LK to focus on MIDI sequencing. Not to forget about the other existing functional blocks, controller for ableton live etc. Let LK become the perfect scene based sequencer on iOS, it already is the best one. You added features to it at a very high pace and LK is probably quite close to what I called before functional completeness - doing everything that users would expect from such a sequencer.
Maybe Loopy Pro will be the great audio clip player we are hoping for and then the two will be a mighty combination. If the dev makes the advanced features MIDI controllable then LK’s automation could utilize them. Doing audio clip playing right and feature complete has a great complexity on its own. Soon we wouldn‘t be happy with just playing a file like AUM‘s file player. We want to modulate the playback, chop clips up in-place, warp and crossfade, etc etc.
It‘s very good that during this rapid feature development you don’t forget about the house keeping. It makes me even more confident that LK is on a very good way. A good moment to express how much I appreciate that you guys are so close to the community. BTW, I still like the idea to return something by starting a community effort to improve the manual.
@krassmann thank you very much for your feedback!
About the community revised manual. I think that help would be great for us. I forgot to tell you that we have our own native english copy revisor. So, even the contributions are not in perfect english, if the raw material is well structured, then it will be easy for us to revise and merge.
I agree with all of this.
Segments is actually working very well for my ‘audio track’ needs at the moment, triggered by notes in LK. It’s just a shame the timestretching is pretty basic.
It doesn’t answer the ‘freeze to audio’ question but I find AUM can handle a lot of stuff going on, even on my iPhone, so it’s not really proving an issue.
Hopefully loopy pro will solve both these issues like you say.
@branis @sinosoidal I really want to hear all the notes of a chord when shifting and not just the note that is touched because unfortunately I don't have the ability to infer from just that note to the chord attached to it.
I agree with @Wim that this feature should definitely be optional, it should be possible to be switched off and then there is no mess when several (non chord) notes are selected. Also the notes should only sound when moved, not during selection. But these are common features of modern piano rolls, so no unusual new claims at this point. 😉
The problem with overlapping notes could be solved with internal quantization. For example, if notes of a chord in the grid have a certain threshold offset, let's say a maximum of an eighth note, because there are also strummed chords, the quantization happens only briefly during the shift to make all notes sound at the same time. All other selected notes that have an offset greater than an eighth note from the first selected note are ignored and do not produce a sound. However, I would not mind at all if chords up to a reasonable defined threshold offset would also output a strummed sound as intended. In fact, that would be my preferred approach.
Later today I’ll try and post a new performance of an LK dawless song with loads of audio. I’m sort of obsessed with the matter 😬 so you struck a nerve...
As @krassmann points out handling audio would be a great burden on LK, and in a way it’s not fair to ask (I’ve done it plenty, I’ve begged...). I agree with the modular, specific purpose apps approach. And LK excels at what it does.
Sadly there’s no good audio solution, there just isn’t. And for some of us DAWs are reminiscent of desktop, not exciting or fresh. Clip based songs are fun and immediate, AUM is fun and refreshing (also VERY stable and reliable). Loopy Pro is our best, and seems like only, hope. Which is pretty incredible if you think about it, there’s been nothing in this dept between good old Loopy HD and forthcoming Loopy Pro.
@gregsmith i don’t own Segments. I’ve tried about every possibility out there. Enso Looper worked great, great midi control, super useful sector features... until you add a bunch of Enso’s to a project, it just crashes. I find Drambo to be the most reliable and solid audio clip-launcher to use with LK. By far. But it’s still very time consuming, overly complicated and a “get by” method. A sampler is not a clip launcher, nor is EG Pulse or Beathawk or...
We desperately need audio clips in auv3 format, and it’s accentuated by LK. It’s like there was no house, then LK came along and provided a nicely built house with solid brick walls and foundation. And then you realize there’s no glass on the windows. You go to the brick guy and complain, but it’s not his doing to manufacture glass. Sorry for the stupid metaphor, but we do need glass for the windows 🙃
Please explain to me as if I was a little child:
What is missing in the available market options, eg: Segments, Loopy Pro, etc, to fill your needs?
@sinosoidal even though I asked about audio clip launcher I agree with the others that it should not be part of lk. Eg pulse is actually a pretty good audio clip launcher. It has multiple outputs which is a must. The problem is that eg pulse is limited to 16 clips. I use lk to launch clip in eg pulse and 16 clips is not enough because I have each instrument in its own clip.
I’m totally with you.
Thinking about it, when I talk about audio, I’m really talking about samples. I use vocal samples a lot which segments records easily, makes short work of slicing up, and allows me to adjust pitch and speed independently - basically all I need from an au sampler, apart from maybe better quality timestretching. You can even then export those slices directly to eg pulse (which I’ve only ever actually done once!)
This is very different to recording yourself playing guitar or whatever which I know other people mean when they talk about audio tracks. If I needed that length of audio track I’d just use cubasis I think.
What are your use cases @tahiche ? Like you I’m very interested in this particular modular holy grail.
As a product manager in my daily life i applaud @sinosoidal position that focusing on one thing and doing it well (and paying off tech debt is crucial) is the smart strategy. I believe we’ve seen enough of Loopy Pro to know that @Michael is about ready to fill the gaping void.
Thanks for your kind words.
What's that void you all mention? Sorry, I just don't make as much music as you all do!
I’ll try and keep this brief ☺️
So I’m sure you know daws have supported putting audio tracks alongside midi tracks on the same timeline basically forever... iOS daws are the same (apart from nanostudio 2 but let’s not go down that rabbit hole)
As you probably know, iOS daws are all missing features for many of us like multi out support etc. so we’re breaking away to modular ‘dawless’ setups that allows us to have these features.
AUM with Xequence 2 is a popular setup but whilst Xequence 2 provides a great midi timeline for AUM, there’s not a good audio track counterpart. @4Pockets had a go with multitrack recorder but it didn’t cut the mustard apparently (I’ve never really bothered with it after seeing all the bug reports seemingly unsolved). People are hacking in looper tools like enso but they don’t really solve the timeline problem.
Now you guys come along with an awesome clip launcher ‘module’ and atom 2 is set to smash the piano roll ‘module’, but we’re still left without a good answer to the audio track ‘module’ (until loopy hd by the looks of things @Michael)
The use cases that I’m aware of are:
Short samples and loops (actually some good options IMO like segments, pulse etc, but most use the built in Apple timestretching which is poor compared to elastique etc.). Also not technically clip launchers if that’s what people want.
Full audio tracks that span the whole timeline, eg. Vocals and guitar tracks - this is where I think enso just about does it for some folk.
Freezing tracks to audio when you hit a limit on what the cpu can handle, like you can in lots of the daws. I’d personally love to be able to easily bounce a midi clip in LK to an audio one - at the moment best option is to record that track’s output into segments then trigger it with a replacement clip, but it’s not particularly elegant. This would allow to change the tempo of the whole song with segments’ timestretching if you wanted to.
I think that sort of wraps it up! Hope that helps explain it a bit further. I’m sure there are some other must haves that I’ve missed.
Currently once I get to a certain point, I record everything to stems then bounce to cubasis for finalising, but it’d be great to not have to necessarily do that.
He means the missing audio clip launcher.
Besides the 3 use cases, there are also different goals, if I see it correct.
1. Would be to launch audio as a clip like in LK, or loopy (don’t have that one so perhaps I’m wrong on that) or like the Launchpad app to use in a jam, or to record a jam.
2. Is arranging audio along a timeline, like in cubasis, as to build a song structure.
3. Would be the freezing to save resources, so same as mentioned.
4. Mangle recorded audio for variation.
I believe the cases can have different goals. For example bouncing a track is nice for both keeping progress and for saving resources. Clip launching of audio can be for jamming but also for song structure. Bouncing a clip to Segments to change up a pattern for variation in an arrangement.
I guess a ‘module’ app that looks like just one audio track of, say, cubasis, where you can arrange several audio clips at different spots on a timeline would fill a gap. You would then use that in AUM like the file player. I don’t even think it’s needs to be very fancy, as you can do all effects, pan, volume etc with other apps in the effect slots.
You would have for example several clips recorded from a jam session with a particular synth, different patterns, filter modulations etc, and arrange them so you have the intro choruse verse etc arranged. You then jam over it with LK clip launching and using the Controller and XY for ffx modulation.
Can you point out a few of these modern piano rolls that have these features? If I have any of them I would like to understand how they work when moving several notes.
I remember fl studio mobile doing this and moving a simple 4 note arpeggio a coupla bars would result in a huge Dracula-esque concerto as every note you scrolled past was played and held until you let go!
They did add a feature to turn it off - dunno if it even still does it at all.
Is it possible to trim a clip to the recorded notes without having to drag the notes around? I mean getting rid of the empty parts on at the beginning and end of a clip.