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.
Which basic DAW for Mac?
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GarageBand is free, excellent, has a ton of great samples and instruments included, and if you need more in future, you can open its files in Logic.
And the Mac version will open iOS GB projects.
Mpc Beats is free and well featured.
Bitwig 8 track
Maybe you can grab Zenbeats, Sunvox, Caustic, Nanostudio 1.
Ok... maybe not all of these are DAWs, but i'm throwing ideas like this is a brainstorm
Audiotool is an awesome web thingie too
https://www.audiotool.com/
I would throw Bandlab Cakewalk, but just noticed it's PC only
I have reaper and sonar too (both currently uninstalled), but whenever I wanted to do something on PC, I would generally go reaper. If you customize the UI/theme you can get it working better for your needs / tastes.
If you're interested in making electronic music a fun option is this:
https://www.mutools.com/
Not perfect (VST3 is coming but not there yet. Time signature changes are not supported. Some parts of the UI can be a little clunky).
But what you do get is a fun and powerful modular synth/audio/midi framework with some great built in tools (a step sequencer, a very useful drum machine).
If you just want to record/mix then Reaper is amazing.
Reaper is great TBH if you're willing to invest time into it, but for casual use is a bit of pain (it's very flexible, but out of the box it's a bit meh).
I recently took up Studio One for a project where it was seemingly the best option for me. I was quite happy with it. Might be the most easy to learn DAW. Most intuitive of any that I've tried (S1, Reaper, Pro Tools, Ableton, Audition). They offer a free month trial and if that's not enough time, $15 will buy you a second month, or third, etc. I own Reaper, but it's almost the exact opposite. Infinitely configurable, but ugly UI (unless you go down the configurable rabbit hole) and very very difficult to learn. Do you like to fiddle or do you prioritize a clean UI/UX?
What you need to decide first is whether you are interested in a DAW for live performance, composing, sound design, mixing, mastering, or what? Your use case should dictate your decision. They all can work, but some of them are geared towards performance, and some towards mixing, and some towards working with video, etc.
I used to think Garageband was unintuitive but then I decided it couldn't be really as it's so popular. Spent £10 or something on an excellent Groove 3 course and now totally love it.
I needed to invest a little time learning and I found it massively rewarding.
@tja
One of the things i like about MultitrackStudio is direct import and export (either direction) between iOS projects and laptop. If you use your iOS synths and like them its very easy to render those tracks to audio for export to your laptop and vice versa.
I like MTS and FL very much but note that the workflows are each very different from conventional DAWs and don't translate well from that type or each other…
If you're not turned off from the GUI or learning curve in Reaper, then it might be a good choice for you. There are certainly a LOT of video howtos out there on learning any aspect of it.
Have you tried the MacOS version of GarageBand? It's quite different than the iOS version ... more traditional DAW like and way less cheesy animations and dorky workflow. It doesn't completely suck. Really. If you're just casually composing on desktop, you might just like it enough to save your money.
FL Studio is great. It's my favorite DAW on any platform. However, I have this feeling that some things about its workflow might drive you a little bonkers. For instance ... a "track" in the song layout view doesn't necessarily contain just one instrument and doesn't necessarily relate to just one mixer channel. You can place clips from any instrument in any lane, and those instruments can be routed to any mixer channel you want. This can twist the brains of people firmly entrenched in traditional DAW thinking something fierce. (Of course you can use it in more rigid ways if you like, but you have to think it through to do so.)
That said - the initial purchase gets you a cross platform (Windows / Mac) with lifetime free updates. That is huge for me as at this stage I wouldn't spend anything further for desktop music production, yet I still have up-to-date, supported, software regardless of whether I use it regularly or not.
I found MPC Beats very confusing. I think people familiar with MPC workflow are probably at home with it, but I just felt lost.
i use bitwig and studio one. bitwig is perfect for sound design and composing. studio one is for everything else.
but… if you commit to reaper, it’ll become the best daw for you.
Do you have an idea of how you want to compose? Style and workflow?
If you want to carry over any of your iOS AUv3, then the selection of DAW's/hosts is more limited. GB, MainStage, Logic, and Reaper are the main DAW's that work with those plugins.
On the mixing and mastering side of things, there's Ardour and Harrison Mixbus to consider too.
Cubase Elements is 99,99 € and Ableton Intro 79 €
I have the Pro / Suite versions and mainly use Ableton these days cause I prefer the workflow
The iOS version of Caustic runs on Mac Mini M1. It was what I started learning on. Seems fairly intuitive to me. Can get relatively deep if you want. No audio tracks, but there are work arounds. I use it to build loops for Loopy Pro. Unfortunately, hasn’t been updated in several years.
@tja I like simple things too.
And I've tried so many DAWs repeatedly and still keep on using two different ones regularly:
Ableton Live and Logic Pro X.
While Logic is the editing powerhouse that allows me to go deeper in MIDI editing and timeline audio mangling, Ableton is still my go-to DAW when I want to try something quickly or play around with loops.
Out of all the DAWs listed in this thread, I would say that Ableton is the easiest to understand without being too limited. And Live Lite costs you nothing.
Garageband wants to be easy to use but they've stripped the UI so much that I'm wondering how to do certain things all the time 😄
I got Harrison MixBus (https://harrisonconsoles.com) after reading about the sound quality in various recording forums. It really does sound pretty great; my workflow is to import mixes or stems from iOS into Harrison for tracking vocals and final mixes. It’s cheap ($89 list and almost always a deal; I think I got it for $39 and recently upgraded to MixBus32c for $49. It’s VERY traditional mixing board kind of DAW, like Logic used to be and ProTools, Digital Performer, etc. I haven’t done any MIDI in it, so can’t comment, but for recording and mixing audio, I like it a lot.