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.
Has the year so far been slow for new music apps and/or significant updates to existing apps?
We all know the big new app launches such as Loopy Pro, but for me, this feels like a quiet first quarter so far.
There again I only follow the forum in sporadic bursts, so maybe this is the general pattern of things these days. August to December see's an unrelenting assault on one's wallet due to the number of sales and promotions so maybe developers feel it's difficult to gain a decent footing when launching apps in the first quarter.
Any thoughts?
Comments
Honestly, I have sooooooo many apps that barely get used as it is that I’m fine with a slow down in releases. I literally can’t think of anything I need? All the bases are covered (many times over). The only thing I’m eagerly awaiting is a major Drambo update.
Good things will come to those who wait...
Bastard Out Of Carolina is pretty good.
All the hints from the Drambo testers have been noticed, and yes that's certainly going to be majorly welcome. It's one of the reasons why I framed the question to include major new functionality, not just new apps.
Anyway, Easter will soon be with us, with its usual juggernaut of promotional activity and the relative calm will be no more...
The Drambo update is the only thing that I’m really looing forward to.
And sometimes i’m wondering what Bram Bos is up to apart from building the car of the future 🛸
Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure is also worth the ticket.....
The most popular apps most of us use are the product of "One Man Shops":
AUM
Loopy Pro
Drambo
4Pockets
The BigCo's seem to be updating their contributions tentatively:
Cubasis
Korg
Roland Cloud/Zenbeats
I'd love to see Reason re-engage since they have a huge stockpile of assets that could be
made available for IOS with a little effort. The commercial results of Reason Compact (which has the essential tech required) and a new CEO turned them back to the less price sensitive Desktop strategies.
The entry of Native Instruments or Ableton into the IOS market would shake things up. It seems inevitable and M1 chips will enable even more powerful apps. The ability to shape code between Mac and iPad might make adding an IOS product less costly since Pro's will want these M1 Macs.
Could you please expand on this?. What does coding for M1 imply?. Is it completely different than previous Macs?. And is it any closer to iOS code?. Or just M1 powered iOS devices?.
Many questions… I’m clueless.
The OS's and programming frameworks are as different as ever they were. I find it's best to view the M1 the same as any other System on a Chip ecosystem. Arm64 chip designs power all manner of OS platforms inclusive of Linux and Windows but that doesn't make it any easier to target both Windows and Linux at the same time whilst developing unique IPs.
AUv3 development is something that's streamlined across iOS and macOS but Ableton, Logic, Bitwig and Cubase themselves don't benefit from the M1 family of chips existing across both mobile and desktop platforms.
I suspect that @McD was commenting more with regards to the processing power of the M1 family of chips is such that the major DAW manufacturers might finally be tempted to provide solutions for iOS that mirror their desktop OS's.
Having a common chip architecture makes porting between OS'es a lot less painful.
Having a really hot chip with significant installed based encourages developers to invest
in these ports.
There are many examples that show a glimpse of a possible future where "Universal"
means iPhone, iPad, Mac and maybe Apple TV:
"Amazed to see Loopy Pro on my MacBook M1 Air." @cyberheater
(NOTE: Designed for iPad. Not verified for MacOS.)
"App Store on my M1 MBP, I see that some of my iOS apps are available under the "Mac Apps" tab ... Animoog Z, Model 15, and SK-51 among others." @kidslow
"Another app I'm able to fairly reliably run on an M1 iMac is the SoundFonts app." @NeuM
"@j_liljedahl (the AUM developer) started a thread and asked if anyone wanted AUM for the Mac" @McD ... indicates it might be easy to consider a port.
And the forum expert on such developer details, @NeonSilicon, weighed in:
Another interesting pieces of interoperability news:
Swift Playgrounds (the lets you develop on the iPad) will be enabled to upload to the App Store for approvals bypassing Xcode and Mac requirements.
The AudioKit project released an AuditKit (base) library for use in Swift Playgrounds.
I suspect that as the big Mac apps are ported to Mac M1l versions it will be easier to consider adding the required extra details for creating an M1 iPad variant.
@dakti shared a more complete list:
I'm going to go with, it depends.
I'm commenting now only on bringing a Mac app to iOS. My comment above that @McD mentioned was about going the other direction, iOS to Mac.
The easy one first, coding for the A series is almost completely the same as for the M series. The only big difference as far as audio stuff goes is how many high priority threads you might want to try to use.
How different coding for Intel versus Apple Silicon is depends on the libraries you use and if you have done much in the way of assembly or specific vector processing for the IC's. Both of those are less common now because of both the compilers being much better and availability of higher level libraries to handle much of this. But, some companies are going to have internal code that they will need to update to bring their audio software to the new Macs. When they do this work, it will work just as well on newer A processors as it does on M1. This could, maybe, motivate some ports to iOS.
Many audio devs, I'd guess most, use third party libraries like JUCE to write their software. As, they move to using newer version of these libraries, it'll be easier for them to bring their apps to iOS. This will be the same for devs that use their own internal cross platform libraries too. When they update them for the M1 Macs, it will be easier to move them to iOS. This isn't completely simple because the UI frameworks are different, but if you are making the effort, you might add in the cross platform stuff to iOS too. I spent a couple of months doing a Swift cross platform macOS, iOS GUI library for myself, and it isn't really that difficult.
VST3 falls into this too. The VST3 library has support for doing both Apple Silicon for Mac VST3, AUv2, and AUv3 as wells as AUv3 on iOS. So, devs moving their software to the VST3 standard might help move things along for iOS too.
But, lots of devs and companies haven't moved to supporting AUv3 or VST3 still. If any of this does motivate some move to iOS, it might still take some time. And then their is still the issue that some companies don't want to deal with the App Store and/or the lower prices on iOS.
Who here has gotten Zeeon to work on their M1 Mac? And how in the world did you even get it on your computer? Same goes for Kai's Volt Synth...
I would be delighted if I could get Beep Street, Kai Aras, Yonac, IceWorks, GeoShred and NumericalAudio apps to work on M1 desktop, but I'd be even more delighted if they OFFERED THEM on the Mac App Store.
Same here.
I look at the collection of music apps on my iPad and it blows my mind.
It's like having a synth app with a million presets - where the hell do you start? Too much choice (I know, "you can't have too much choice").
I've been going back to some golden oldies like Egoist lately. Lots of fun rediscovering them again.
I've had to try really hard not to buy anymore apps.
So far it's been a good year with Loopy Pro and Midi Tape Recorder.
Egoist is so fun. I can lose a whole day whenever I pull that one out!
Oh and speaking of Egoist, this is a neat trick I discovered with it being manually/externally triggered:
That's just basic to show how you can have a different effect per key. Things get a lot more interesting when you sequence it externally and incorporate the bass and drum parts.
Just so it's clear on the motivation of my original question. I wasn't asking because I've got an addiction to collecting new apps, but I am interested in the seasonality of app development and launch strategies.
What I've observed in recent years is that hardcore customers of audio apps have built their purchase habits around major promotional activity. That activity includes the discounting that's often available when new apps launch. Or more commonly the discounting that's available during the major Easter, Summer, Black Season, & Xmas sales (this is often a smart way to purchase as one doesn't end up buying apps simply because they have a new launch discount - seasonal promotional purchases are more often based on feedback from the community, so they're less likely to be blind purchases).
One might think that it's sensible to launch new apps during the downtime between major promotional activities, but I suspect that developers have observed many potential customers only purchasing during discounting periods, and so have decided that they have a better chance of hitting a critical mass of new customers by launching their new apps and significant upgrades during major promotional activity periods.
But as I mentioned in my original post, I only observe the AB community in sporadic bursts, so it's possible I'm reading non-existent patterns.
Here's a documented IOS developer pattern:
Mmm, I catch a whiff of Loopy Pro...