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.
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Loopy Pro Questions
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Maybe I have something set wrong, but my Metronome setting will not retain the Mode setting "Count-In Only." If I close the window and play a project, it always reverts back to "Always On."
So, if you save a project and reopen it , the setting changes?
It seems to be unpredictable. Sometimes it will save the changes. But even if Count-In Only is selected, if I play a project, the setting changes to Always On, and the metronome is always playing. FYI, I always use the sequencer window, but am having the same behavior in the donuts window. So you have never experienced this behavior? It's quite strange.
that hasn't happened to me. is there a set of steps that reliably or frequently has that effect?
Nothing seems to work for me to get the metronome to do a simple count-in at the stop of a sequenced song, and then stop after the count-in. As described, I can't get the setting to save, or stick during a session. I am now resorting to using Follow Actions to toggle the metronome on/off. Thanks for your help anyway, @espiegel123.
Is there any way to resize or collapse the view on the mixer? There’s so much dead space and perhaps the smaller iPad Pro screen doesn’t help. Seems like I need to swipe to the right every time to see the lower mixer. With 40+ tracks, it’s rather cumbersome. Have to go left to right and back again….
There isn’t currently a way to hide channels. You can shrink it vertically but that’s all. You can drag things to reorder them which can help.
@espiegel123 Yeah, that’s what I suspected after finding no information on it anywhere. Very unfortunate and a real time waster when experimenting with new configurations. Thanks for confirming!
Hey Team Loopy, retrospective recording has broken down for me. I’ve been using LoopyPro since it was released, took a break from music for 2 months, and when I came back to my LoopyPro projects, retrospective recording no longer works as it used to. Now when I record a retrospective loop, the majority of the time, the Loopy master clock stops when the loop is done recording. Other times, the loop indefinitely records, even though I have it set for 2 bar retrospective recording. I’ve checked settings at the clip, color, and global level but can’t figure out what’s going on.
Was there an update in the last 2-3 months that changed the logic of retrospective recording?
I don’t understand. “Indefinitely records” and “retrospective recording” are incompatible terms. You don’t see anything happening when you retrospective record. When you tap a clip, the last number of bars set in the master record length are dumped into the loop.
Maybe post a video of what you’re doing, including the master clock and clip settings?
There haven’t been any fundamental changes to the process in the last several months.
Thanks for the prompt response, wim!
I agree that retrospective recording shouldn't trigger a loop to record after the "press," but... that's what seems to have been happening. What video formats does the forum accept? MOV and MP4 don't seem to be accepted.
After some trouble shooting, I was able to get things working again by turning off "pause clock when idle" in the global settings. I'm a bit confused as I had never had that setting impact recording before (I understood it to simply stop master clock when all loops are stopped), and hadn't changed that setting since last using LoopyPro, but turning this off seems to fix my problems.
Generally, the settings i've been using are: Play/stop quantization Loop (also tried master and custom at 1 bar), Phase Lock On, Time stretch off, record if empty on, pause clock when idle on (now i've turned this off), retrospective on, retrospective quantization quantized, after recording play. I set the retrospective record length to 2, 4, or 8 bars, at the clip level.
upload the video to youtube and post a link here on the forum.
what do you mean "i set the retrospective record length ... at the clip level"?
it looks like there is a bug. pause clock on idle is on, if no loops are playing, the clock stops if you tap a clip to retro record (play after record is on). That doesn't seem to happen if other clips are playing. I'll report it on the slack.
@GreedySpark : after rebooting and restoring defaults (and turning on pause clock on idle), i can't make it happen any more. if you have a document that it happens in, save it as @Michael might want to lookmat it.
Thanks for looking into this. Here’s the default “new project” in Loopy, with the bug at Clip 1. I’ve just deleted the other clips to make it obvious. All I’ve edited from the default new project is to set retrospective record settings at the clip, color, and global level.
https://youtube.com/shorts/d42HhsYTtTg?feature=share
Are you using the 1.0.15 or 1.0.16 (which was just released)
Out of curiosity, make a copy of the project, in clip settings tap the restore defaults button and set the settings as you want them, does the problem still happen?
Using version 1.0.15. Restoring defaults didn’t fix the issue. I can upload the test project i made to recreate the bug, but unless I'm missing something, project files don't seem to be a supported file format on the forum
Here's the other weird retrospective recording issue that's happening. Clip length is set to 2 bars with retrospective record on, but when I press the clip, it seems to retrospective record those 2 bars and then just continues recording indefinitely. Pressing the clip a second time does not stop the recording.
Try zipping the project file.
Retrospective recording uses the master cycle setting for the length. What was the master cycle setting? If you want to use retrospective looping to capture a specific length, set the master cycle length rather than setting the clip length.
Are you able to reproduce the issue of the recording not stopping in the default project or if you remove the clip’s length setting?
The video doesn’t show any related settings. I tried setting a clip length different from the master cycle setting and did not get the shown behavior. It seems like there is probably combination of settings involved.
Thanks again for the prompt responses and outstanding support. The app and the support are truly unmatched!
Attached is a project file with retrospective record bug #1 (master clock stops after recording) on the default new project with retrospective recording settings added. I believe bug #2 (recording not stopping when using retrospective recording) was also occasionally happening with a default new project, but now i'm not seeing it happen. Maybe restoring default settings did the trick for bug #2? If it does start happening again with a default project (or at least a project that is less complex than the one above), I'll get a video and post the project here. For the time being, i'm going to dive back into working on the project at hand
With that said, I'm not sure that I understand what you mean that retrospective recording uses the master cycle length. I've set projects up to retrospective record with each clip in a color group having a different clip length (e.g. 2 bars, 4 bars, and 8 bars). For live performance, this allows you to decide how long of a loop you want by simply hitting the clip with the correct bar length, instead of having to fiddle with the master cycle settings. I have noticed weird behavior from time to time (e.g. half of my 4 bar loop doesn't record), but for the most part it has worked. Are you saying that loopypro is not designed to work that way? Maybe I'm not understanding the intricacies of loopypro's retrospective recording function.
@GreedySpark : retrospective looping uses a buffer whose length is set by the master cycle length. The clip length set by setting the length of an individual clip length might perform unreliably if the clip length is different from the master cycle length. I don't know what safeguards @Michael may have put in the software in this regard.
Also, be aware that the actual retro buffer length is determined by the largest the master cycle has been during your cycle. If you want a retro length of 8 -- the master cycle length will have needed to be 8 or more at some point in the session. That internal buffer doesn't ever get shrunk. So, if you want to sometimes capture 8 bars -- make sure that it is set to 8 bars when you start the session (or at least at some point 8 bars before you plan to do an 8 bar capture).
One way of easily changing retro size on the fly is to set up a widget for each length you'd like to use. Have that widget's press actions be 'Set Master Length' followed by Retro Record with the target being next tapped clip. Want to capture a 2 bar retro loop, tap your '2' widget and the loop that you want to receive it. Most of my projects has 2,4 and 8 buttons. Also make sure that your initial project setting has master of the longest loop you want to retro capture.
Another way to do it would be to add a gesture in each color that sets the master clock as desired for the color followed by a record action (with retro turned on).
if you hardware a clip's length to something longer than the retro buffer has been, it might behave strangely.
This is very illuminative, thank you.
I've removed the individual clip lengths, set master length to 2 bars and am no longer experiencing the indefinite recording issue. I'll setup some widgets per your recommendation to set retrospective record length on the fly.
With your approach, do you need to tap 2/4/8 before you start playing your musical phrase, so that the buffer is in the correct configuration before you begin playing the phrase? Or can you be 3 bars into playing an 8 bar phrase, select "8", finish playing the phrase, and then hit the clip at the end of the phrase?
For what it's worth, I had been working on this project for months and had never had the indefinite record issue before, so it's curious that this issue is coming up now. I'm pleased that it seems that there is a better approach that is not too difficult to implement and appreciate the insight.
First off, if you set the project to 8 at the beginning of your session, you can then switch between master cycle lengths freely at the last moment without worry. I.e. if you started at eight and later set it to two, an action can set it to eight and immediately capture 8 bars. If there isn't enough in the buffer, I think what will happen is that when you hit retro it will capture as retro what it can and then start a recording count out till the buffer is full.
It is possible that as various things have gotten tidied up that the endless record thing has cropped up in some circumstances.
Does the endless record thing happen in the file you uploaded or is that in a different project?
Well shoot. Even with the individual clip lengths removed I'm getting the indefinite recording retrospective loops.
Unfortunately, even as a zip file, the project is too large to attach. It is currently not happening on smaller default projects, but I was able to replicate this bug on the default project yesterday, although I didn’t take a video. If I open and close LoopyPro, sometimes the bug happens in this project and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe 50% of the time.
For some reason the purple group is not indefinitely recording, but the yellow group is. I can't for the life of me figure out the difference, other than that there are two different audio sources. Purple audio source is a hardware mic. Yellow audio source is one-shot samples within the loopy session, with each one shot being triggered by a midi controller.
For further context, here is the hardware setup/signalflow:
I realize that this is a complicated setup, but it was working just fine a few months (other than turnado being generally glitchy) ago before I temporarily shelved the project.
@GreedySpark : what was the master cycle length when you tapped the loop and what was the loop length set to? The behavior suggests to me that a longer retro length was asked for than there was in the buffer.
Can you upload a zipped version of the project to Dropbox or the like?
Master clock was set to 2 bars (also happens when set to 1 bar). Loop length was unset, as I was attempting to implement the approach you recommended.
The below link should have 2 versions of the project. Version 8.5 I removed the loop length settings at the loop level. Also including version 8.3, which has loop lengths set.
Thanks again for digging in here!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1K-w-krZTF3QVfndIeTKXH1GF7dkMVelQ
It’s definitely worth trying this with .16, @GreedySpark - there was an issue that sounds very similar to that which I’ve fixed in that version.
I suppose trying the new version should’ve been my first step! I’ll give it a try on Monday and report back.
Apologies if this is covered elsewhere. I wanted to add some visual feedback to the AU Loopy Pro MIDI layout that I made for https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/50895/atom-2-orchestrated-by-senode-ipad-only. The idea was to use a slider which was either fully on or off to indicate a state change.
I thought that I would be able to do this using a MIDI binding using these options:
I have tried a number of different combinations of options (different types of MIDI input etc) but cannot get my widgets to respond to MIDI input.
For this example, I pointed apeSoft "Send MIDI" at both Loopy Pro AU and mfxMonitor. Here is the mfxMonitor output showing what I believe to be the correct MIDI (Chi 1, CC 0, value):
I expected to see the Loopy Pro widget react to me changing the incoming CC value but it does not react at all.
Is there something else I need to do, or have I misunderstood what the MIDI binding functionality does?
Thanks.
Does the widget control anything? If I recall correctly, if a widget controlled by midi doesn’t update its state if it doesn’t do anything. Is the widget set to control something?
EDIT: my recollection was faulty. The behavior I mentioned was in a pre-release version. If I have a slider that does nothing but receive midi , it is reflecting the incoming value.
Can you post a simple example project?
EDIT AGAIN: I retract my re-edit. My test actually had the slider assigned to do something and I didn’t notice!
That was it! I set the widget to send out a MIDI message on value change and it now reacts to incoming CC. Thanks for the quick response @espiegel123.