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.
Roadmap for Roland Zenbeats... thoughts, wishes, hopings!
Was reading up on Roland MC´s and Zenology and started to think about the road ahead for Zenbeats. Roland has a long history of being very quiet when it comes to news about new products and development and I expect nothing else when it comes to Zenbeats. The presence and comms of @MatthewAtZenbeats is very appreciated though, but I guess it has more to do with his Stagelight background than Roland changing its ways of working.
Anyway. I can´t see it any other way than that Zenbeats is the perfect platform for Roland to merge parts of different products into a ”music production environment” software. The similarities and functions of the MC´s are there and with small graphical adjustments in the UI they will be able to get a unison appearance, but still keeping them apart productwise.
Enter Zenology either as the onboard engine in Zenbeats or as an AUv3, and you have an extremely powerful and versatile app. Hopefully this will be the case on all platforms, including iPadOS. Roland Cloud is already available for Mac and PC in Zenbeats, but demands more processing power than the iPad can deliver today. Enter Zenology:-).
I also realize the pricing question with buy or subscription will be highly debated but still. Also fixing a bunch of things mentioned in other threads will just add to the value.
What do you think? What are your thoughts, wishes and hopings for Roland Zenbeats?
Have a nice weekend!
Regards,
DMfan
Comments
No love for Zenbeats?
😌
Sooner or later we’ll likely see Zenology in one form implemented in ZenBeats.
It might not be as fully featured as Zenology Pro but just like the SoundCanvas that brings a broad palette of crossplatform sounds with limited tweaking. With 4000+ presets one is likely to find something that fits with a bit of adjustments and effect changes.
Real bonus would be if Zenology for iOS would also be an AUv3 and not just locked into ZenBeats without any subscription BS.
Time will tell...
Hey everyone,
I love speculative feature request threads like this! As usual, we're always working to make Zenbeats better and this community has been a great driver of that.
Stay tuned!
👍
Stage light and Roland Are very disappointing for all the users who bought Stagelight and can’t use zenbeats because they are out of the region of the App Store. I keep in getting promises and it’s been a long while now.
User-defined scales, please, like Animoog or Synthscaper.
I was trying to send this to the developers, but couldn't find any email id. So I am writing it here. [iOS unlock 2, iPad Pro 11 2018]
About Loop-builder: Suppose I start playing a loop by tapping on it. When the loop is playing and if I tap another loop on the same track, the new loop starts playing instantaneously and previous loop stops even if it has not been played full. So if we want to play a specific set of loops in some order just by tapping them one by one then that is not possible. This is problematic in case of live jamming.
So I suggest, there will be an option somewhere to enable or disable this functionality, whether a loop will start playing instantaneously, of after the completion of the loop that is already playing.
About the piano roll: The piano roll needs some improvements. First, it is a bit difficult to move or resize a note, it is generally difficult to select a note or the ends of it, and if I am touching a note a little bit longer to resize it, then the menu pops up which is extremely annoying. Secondly, there are many different cursors to choose from, the select/multi select/draw etc, which make the work very slow. So I suggest, remove any long press menu while touching a note. Put the menu on the top of the piano roll. Then keep only two cursors, one is for create/delete and another for move/resize single or multiple notes, something like the garage-band piano roll. And keep this two cursor selection icons on the top of the piano roll, not inside an additional menu. This will speed up the workflow a lot. Furthermore, the options like select all notes, move +12, etc may also be moved on the top border of the piano roll instead of the additional left option window. There is enough space for many icons on the top border of the piano roll.
The audio editor: The audio editor needs some serious update, features like normalization, cut, copy etc are essential. There must be a db scale on the borders.
Now the last one may be difficult, but it will be really excellent. Say, I made a midi loop in the loop-builder and copy it to the timeline. Now if I edit the loop in the timeline, it does not affect the loop in the loop builder. Or if I edit the loop in the loop-builder, it does not affect the loop in the timeline. It will be excellent if there is an option to keep them sync. So if I make a song in the timeline from the loops and I want to edit a few notes in the loop, then I can just go to the loop builder and change that loop and it will affect the whole song. This is something that is there in FL Studio (PC/Mac version). So basically we will have a library of patterns and we create a song from the patterns. This will be an extremely powerful feature that can make the Zenbeats incomparable to any DAW in iOS.
Well, it's quantized to one beat (not instantaneously) , you can change that up to 4 beats , but I agree it would be great to have a 'wait until previous loop' quantization
I think I'm the only one enjoying the piano roll. Touch in the middle and select it to drag it. Touch the ends to change length , hold for options , I like it !
The audio editor doesn't need update . There isn't any editor to update it , we need an editor
Maybe instead of copy there could be a "clone" feature and the cloned pattern would have a link symbol to indicate that a pattern is linked in both views
But we also need automation recording !!!!!
👍👍👍👍👍👍
How bout Roland SoundCloud (Terra, Aira instruments) in Zen Beats? Possible?
Hi @Santanu
Thanks for the detailed requests. I have some questions and notes below.
How about just adding an additional option to not switch to the next loop until the current playing loop completes?
And keep this two cursor selection icons on the top of the piano roll, not inside an additional menu. This will speed up the workflow a lot. Furthermore, the options like select all notes, move +12, etc may also be moved on the top border of the piano roll instead of the additional left option window. There is enough space for many icons on the top border of the piano roll.
Thanks for the tips and requests here. We did a ton of rearranging in MIDI editor for version 2 to bring the most common items used from the menus and left inspector/editor to the top bar Our tool selection, is actually on the top bar and in the touch/hold and right click menu. This is helpful for desktop/mouse userx but if you're having issue accidentally triggering it, maybe we could extend the time. Let me know your thoughts. We're trying to keep the top bar only populated with the essentials (mostly menu and mouse driven stuff) while keeping the left panel for touch interactions.
>
We have plenty of improvements planned. Thanks for adding some additional useful requests!
This is an interesting idea! I like it!
I really love zenbeats but it bothers me that the drum machine doesn’t have amp envelopes.
my tuppeneth of gripes, feature requests and things needing changing:
1 ) add ability to change precount eg from 1 bar to 2 bars etc.
2 ) a mode where the volume faders can be much taller - they currently are too short for detailed control.
3 ) a much better thought out preset category chooser GUI. a scrolling list mode is sub-optimal. Better to present a rectangular grid of categories where ALL categories (lead/pad/keys etc ) can be seen in as single view.
4 ) the MIDI event editor GUI needs optimising. For example ( unless its buried in the 'Rtf-m" and I missed it ) having to hold-press and then pick an option in order to multi-select events isnt ideal. At the minimum - give us the options as a tool-bar so switching between modes can be a single click. And/or add an option whereby as a long-press automatically puts the editor into multi-delect mode. I suggest to the developers and product manager that you survey ALL the DAW and MIDI event type iOS apps out there and figure out which have the best implementation of a touch based piano roll MIDI-event editing.
5) Left panel "Channel strip" : hiding a bunch of common actions behind the clock-cog "settings" icon is poor GUI. Stuff such as delete/rename/cut/copy/duplicate. are NOT track "settings" but track "ACTIONS" and thus should not be hidden underneath an icon more commonly associated with "preferences and settings:.
6) ZENCORE. This is clearly the future for this app and Roland. So give us users ( new to Zenbeats ) the option of hiding all the old pre ZC1 instruments - that came with Zenbeats 1 - from view - where Zencore presets are the default - and the only other instrument option is 3rd pty AUv3 instruments and effects .
7 ) Give us an option to HIDE all the rarely used Apple AUv3 instruments.,
8) give us the option to hide from plugin-picker list. certain AU v3 plugins we are unlikely to want to use inside Zenbeats. In essence -the less choices and scrolling we users have to do the better.
9 ) For both ZenBeats and Fantom - support exporting in OMF (Open Media Framework) format as well as in Ableton format. This will make it much more useful for those who want to use ZB as a sketchbook for ideas but then develop a song into something requiring a full DAW.
10 ) Another annoyance: There are many places in ZenBeats on iOS where a dialog box is presented where one can manually enter a value via a pop up keyboard. Trouble is - currenrtly just the default iPad keyboard is presented thus I constantly have to press buttons to switch to the numeric keyboard.
When a data value is clearly only ever going to be NUMERIC its much more workflow friendly to only present a NUMERIC on-screen keyboard for data entry. One should never - GUI wise be presented with the option to enter alphanumeric characters in a data entry field - where - for example in the case of BPM - only a number is valid.
+1
proper bus routing please
An option to make clips/regions solidly opaque. Just too much going on with a border around each clip
An option to reverse the scroll direction.
There are two > @DMfan said:
Yes I agree too, especially with the comments about the MIDI editor.
Specifically, there are three key enhancements to the MIDI editor I'd like to see.
(1) The ability to quantise ends of notes. This is a basic feature present in most other MIDI editors (e.g. Cubasis) and currently requires a lot of manual note-by-note editing to accomplish this.
(2) When using multi-select, either Add a Select None button or make the Select All button a toggle between selecting everything and selecting nothing. Or make it so that when the user doesn't select any notes when drawing a rectangle, all notes are deselected. Or ideally some combination of the above.
(3) Provide a way to enable the user to see, and ideally edit, the Note Velocity without having to tap on each individual note to see it! Either colour coding or even better a Cubasis style bar chart in the automation lane.
These would be relatively simple enhancements which would nevertheless make basic MIDI editing much less cumbersome and time consuming.
Over to you @MatthewAtZenbeats !
+1 for Zenology as an AUv3. And more editing options. And access to the Roland Cloud instruments would be great, but I understand if IOS isn’t powerful enough (yet) to support these. There aren’t many things I would even consider a subscription for, but access to the best of Roland’s sounds might just swing it.
Reviving an old thread here, decided it was probably better than creating a brand new one for my random musings. But damn! Anyone who tried Zen Beats a time or two, thought it was alright but too buggy or just not quite right, well - it may be time for a revisit. I’m guessing I haven’t fired it up for maybe 30 days, something like that... maybe a bit longer. But wowza! The difference is mind boggling. I can’t believe how much this app has improved since I first tried it (I guess that was the re-branding, not sure). This is shaping up to be the real deal. Dare I say, the realest deal available on iOS at the moment? For pattern based, it’s damned close. I’m preferring it over pretty much anything at the moment after the latest facelift. It’s very, very good and in my experience, very stable. Check it out if you haven’t in a while!
It was my go to for months but I was getting multiple crashes every session then drambo was updated for auv3s and I've not used it since
Zenbeats is my goto DAW on iOS and I also use it on my laptop. If you use frozen tracks with the ‘Transfer Song’ feature it is very easy to combine iOS and laptop. I use that especially for browsing loops e.g. with loopcloud. So, here is my wishlist
All of these would be welcomed. Regarding #5, in the plugin dropdown menu, press and hold any plugin and you’ll have the option of putting it into quarantine. Super handy.
I liked the idea of cross-platform but it doesn't work well on my desktop setup, unfortunately. The scaling to 'full screen' doesn't actually fill a second monitor which is pretty poor tbh. No problems with any other DAW. Also, desktop ZB doesn't find a certain plugin no matter that the exact same VST directories in Reaper, Cubase etc all find the plugin no problem.
I did contact support who told me about the 'full screen' option in settings - which isn't the problem - and doesn't work! And he told me he was using the plugin that I can't get ZB to see no matter what - I'm sceptical, to say the least, he was telling me the whole truth there but hey....!
I like the idea of the program but it doesn't feel mature enough yet as a viable option on desktop. And I agree with @ehehehe above - the various purchase option configurations (Roland Cloud, Backstage, Account, Zenology etc) are not clear.
Audiobus
IIA
Master Tuing
That great, thanks!!!
I would also appreciate a better integration for MIDI generators. ATM they can only be a MIDI FX for the instrument of that track. But I'd like to have more flexibility. Similar to AUM where I can run MIDI generators on a separate track and I'm able to route their output to all other MIDI instruments. Generally the MIDI routing is a weakness.
They’re worse than unclear. They seem deliberately designed to obfuscate the purchase price in a deceptive way.