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.
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Count me in for this: iPad, MPC ONE, Moog Werkstatt, MicroFreak, various pedals and keyboards etc.
Right on, it’s like a USC film student making a movie on an iPhone. They knew what the wanted to accomplish so they made the most of the tool they had!
As mentioned above I’m doing this - I’m using a USB3 CCK, ESI M4UeX MIDI/hub and Evo 4 audio as a fairly cheap way to integrate hardware I already owned (circa £200 for the 3 with used buys). This provides quite a bit of MIDI I/O and minimal audio I/O, but I’m finding iOS effects hit the spot, leading to my old hardware effects and mixer only being used for monitoring. Feel free to fire away with any questions!
I personally just can't take to desktop at all after getting used to iOS. I agree with @sevenape - things like Koala will pull people in, then things like AUM / Loopy Pro will keep them here. I do see us having fewer devs, fewer releases and higher prices for apps but it's really no bad thing. Most of us have far mors apps than we use. I value quality over quantity. But I definitely would like to see more apps that really take advantage of the touch screen.
I would say yes though it is still very very early days for iOS music production the trajectory is clear from my point of view.
I’m making music on the iPad for two years now. Watching recently Jakob Haq‘s video about the evolution of iOS as a music platform I‘ve realized that it came a long way. I’ve learned that actually the pressure from the community made Apple develop IAA and subsequently AUv3. I think Apple does take it serious but it is also true that the market is comparatively small and that is the main reason for the relatively slow evolution of iOS as a platform for professional music making.
Since the advent of the M1 iPads the hardware is almost on par with Apple’s low end laptops. Cubasis 3 is the most advanced iOS DAW especially in terms of utilizing the hardware. Having CB3‘s multi-core rendering turned on I can run 30 instances of Model D while in AUM I get the crackles with more than 9. A forum user made a test with audio tracks, each with a medium heavy synth, a channel strip and a reverb and he could run more than a hundred CB3 tracks on his M1 iPad Pro. I think we are very close to the performance of a MacBook Air. This clearly shows the hardware, iOS, CoreAudio on iOS basically delivers. Yes, I know iOS file system is a pain in the ass but it’s not a show stopper.
The slow evolution of the DAWs is probably the main roadblock but they are key for a professional workflow. Some features like comping for Midi recording or groove quantize even existed in Cubase for Atari from 1989. I mean look at the recent bugfix release 3.3.3 of CB3. It took the team some months to fix four issues from their issue tracker and there was no new feature added except iPad Mini support. I’m in the software industry myself and I must say this is a slow pace and clearly shows that Steinberg allocates rather small resources to Cubasis development. I’m sure this makes total sense for commercial reasons but against all odds CB3 is still the most advanced iOS DAW and this clearly shows the whole dilemma of the platform.
Hands down, music making on the iPad is already quite awesome but to replace a laptop we need a DAW that is almost on par with the desktop DAWs. And this is where Apple comes into play. I think Apple has a very obvious roadmap to empower developers to easily develop cross platform for MacOS and iOS. This could lead to more shared code between software for both platforms and bring desktop DAW features to iOS. That we are currently a niche is not carved in stone. I think there would be many more producers come to iPad if there would be a professional DAW.
Awesome! I use M-Audio Air 192|4 as my audio interface and a HyperDrive 6-in-1 hub. I also have a iConnectivity mioXC USB-C/USB-A MIDI Interface, which is a really cool “Swiss Army Knife” device.
Fully agree to this. As an instrument, groovebox and as a mobile musical hub glueing your hardware and apps together, the iPad is already an extremely powerful solution. I think even better than a laptop. Out of frustration over the missing DAW features I tried to migrate to Mac and Logic but it failed and I came back to the iPad as I was missing my apps, the portability and the touch operation.
yes
This is how I tend to think of it. I don’t want iOS music to be “on par” with desktop systems or hardware—those options are still out there! I couldn’t care less if we get the “Golden DAW” for iOS because it’s missing the point completely. We are entering a new era of music making FOR mobile devices. Music is consumed on YouTube, TikTok, and social media yet to come. It’s ephemeral to many but every so often someone’s attention is caught and the artist (if they are paying attention) can develop a direct relationship with their followers. So the trick here is to democratize music making and let creativity be the guiding principle rather than “does it do side chain compression” or whatever. I’ll be bummed if iOS apps just try to ape the past.
Yeah, i think we make music that suits the tools we are using. I mean, the tools shape the direction we take. Limits are often good. Look at what the dogme movement did for cinema for example.
IOS, particularly things like AUM where a lot of us got used to not working with a timeline, is great for pushing people in the direction of minimalism, ambient, experimental and textural stuff. I can fully appreciate that if people are trying to make standard dance music like the stuff that evolved from desktop daw-based musicians then they may prefer to use a desktop daw. I think iOS appeals to people who like sound design, generative midi, or the kind of immediacy and hands on feeling you can get with playing a traditional instrument.
Spot on. Speaking of which, I hope we will see @deltaVaudio release his latest work sometime soon. The beta version has been on the shelf (and is release ready IMHO) for quite a while but it exemplifies the “next level” stuff you can do with sound and a pane of glass in a live environment. I’ve never been a huge ambient or sound sculpting artist but the beta version has totally mesmerized me and has reshaped how I make music. That’s what I expect from iOS!
Feature-wise Cubasis has 98% of what I would want out of a DAW…but the GUI doesn’t work for me…for example I would want MSR on every track strip. Why only MS? Plus Launching a instrument to start recording seems like a deliberate maze of clicks
This depends on the vertical zoom level I think? Nothing when small, then just MS, then MSR (and more?)
Oh yes, though I want it on the same horizontal line. Doubling the vertical real estate per track just to arm, or unarm is a waste on a space deprived device
I was missing the couch.
I never manage to get anything interesting going on the laptop (I have Arturia Lab Lite and Ableton Lite, which covers about the same ground and a bit more as what I have on the iPad, and it’s an M1 so I can even run many of the same apps), whereas I can lose myself into anything I do in the iPad in seconds. A big change was to stop thinking about the iPad as a DAW replacement and more as a dawless mixing and effects board, where it is positively endless and superior than anything on the market. It nows sits closest to me on my desktop surrounded by the other toys, instead of being placed where a laptop would usually go.
I don’t think we’re only living an iOS golden age (I have some issues with that trope, of the academic sort) but I do think the things we have within our reach are just incredible.
Ok so..... you get the ipad because you want a portable (ie, no power outlets needed) music making device that you don't have to drag a million wires around to make it useful. And then, to those ends, the customers willingly let that paradigm extinguish in exchange for one that forces you to buy a bunch of janky dongles and extensions to the point where you need a carrying case that's as big as a laptop you were trying to replace was in the first place? I need so many adapters and dongles and usb hubs (which for no good reason can no longer be powered by the ipad itself anymore after an update a year or two ago and now needs ANOTHER dongle that needs to be battery powered by some completely different power source) that it pretty much undos any edge I would have portability wise over my other devices. Which sucks, but the music app ecosystem is still world class without competition despite Apple being an anti-consumer piece of shit, so I'm still all in with ipad. So now I have this device, that before if it had a headphone jack would always be useful to me in every situation, now only works if I have a dongle. And for no benefit. It's not better to have it this way, it is in all ways worse, yet so much convenience was sacrificed to make it so. If I lose the dongle, or it breaks, my ipad is worthless. So we created a problem out of nothing, making a device patently less useful so that in 10 years we can go back and be like 'gee apple were ahead of the game' as we are all drowning in houses full of halfbroken or outdated dongles. I honestly don't get it. It feels like I'm taking crazy pills that people are ok with this. So what, are y'all telling me you'll be ok when in 10 years when ipad has convinced everyone that 'it's no big deal' that we need 1,000 dongles and dongles to those dongles in order to make the ipad work?
Here's a crazy idea: how about we build the dongles into the ipad! So that instead of slowly gutting the internal functionality of the device and externalizing it into dozens of separate dongles we get an ipad that 'just works' (that was the supposed motto of apple products, right?)
Ultimately the fact remains: the things that make ipad music production so great is not Apple, but the app developers. Everything I hate about making music on ipad is directly related to Apple's bullshit. Thank the heavens for these app developers. Literally legends.
I'd also like to know where you guys are getting 10$ official dongles. The official camera adapter with charging port is still 30$ and the third party dongles only work until the os updates and you need to buy a new one. Please show me where you are getting official dongles for 10$, that would really be somewhat game changing. If I can get dongles for a few bucks it's not as painful. 30$ is steep. 10$ is still steep but I might be able to live with.
Apple did create an environment for these apps to happen. Developers aren’t running to make these apps on Android.
Something else that hasn’t really been discussed here are the developments being made to the non-musical aspects of mobile devices that make it possible for professionals, not just hobbyists, to primarily stick to mobile.
For example, SoundCloud and YouTube allow you to upload music instantly from your phone. There are a number of photo and video editing apps that allow you to combine your music with visuals to upload to various platforms.
The only thing I can’t do entirely on my phone just yet is upload to Distrokid. I’m hoping that comes soon.
I know I'm ranting here but, like, if we want to talk about golden ages for ipad music I'd like to see some actual innovation with the ipads themselves. It's 2021, I can buy a 500GB sd card for 50 bucks but iPad is still separating the 'class' of their ipads by storage capacity, offering 64gb as the base and asking an extra few hundred bucks for a 256 gb harddrive upgrade. Which in today's standards is really not that much space. There's really no good reason why every ipad doesn't have 1 tb of storage, standard. Why not inst4ead have a standard ipad class that is bluetooth/wireless focused with no holes, and another with a lot of in/out ports and connectivity? I'd gladly spend a ton of extra money of that. I'd legit spend over $1,000 for an ipad that had the connectivity equivalent of an audio interface built in to it. I only want to carry two things. My ipad and my midi controller. I don't want a bag of wires/dongles/usbhubs/batteries to drag around and lose.
Fair enough. Although I wonder what the backroom reasons are for this...
I just this morning uploaded direct to DistroKid from Safari in iPhone…it works now
Exactly, I imagine it won't be long until big name companies ala Korg / NI etc will just be able to sell their own tablets with all the yummy ports and musician friendly ergo this/that.
Thanks for the mention @McD
We are > @Stuntman_mike said:
Count me in also; iPad, Launchpad Pro MK3, Deepmind 12, Alesia SR16, Real guitars and basses. Also various pedals (Blueboard, BOSS GT1, etc.)
Oh sweeet! iOS 15 must have fixed the issues I was having. Thank you for the heads up.
I believe that iOS is already in its 1st golden age, if we look at things like MIDI AUv3s. It's amazing what a host like apeMatrix and AUM along with a few AU MIDI processors and sequencers can do to MIDI, relatively easily and inexpensively.
And anyone remember monster 19" racks? The iPad with an AU host and a few AUs crushes those 19" racks.
And there are many unique processors on iOS that're seemingly ignored on this platform, but are lauded in other platforms like Eurorack and Max/MSP/PD/Max4Live. Especially ones built by the community.
Maybe it's the modularity that's off-putting for some folks, but imo, the modularity and its flexibility surpasses anything on any other platform.
As far as DAWS, folks are especially picky about those.
Agreed.
Me too, I would love to see what kind of apps would happen in the Android environment.
I would argue that we are already here.
We have devices with incredible power and storage coupled with an amazing amount of super talented developers crafting fantastic music making apps that cost buttons. Can’t see how it could get much better then this.