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 Ipad Air enough ram to make music?
Hello
I saw this video.
He´s using audiobus with a couple of synths, seems there is to little ram for the programs to work smoothly.
Ipad Air only has 1g, that is fairly small. So i would like to know if the Ipad has enough memory to go around?
Comments
It kinda depends on what you use at the same time. That vid has 4 synths a DAW and a multi FX unit.
You can make music on an ipad 2 - you just bounce synths down so they are audio not running a synth app. So all depends on what you find acceptable, workflows etc.
Also different apps require different levels of resources. ISEM (one of the synths) in that video has always been hungry in my opinion.
Many people here make music on ipad 2, ipad 3, ipad air ipad mini. Then again a lot of people complain with those same devices
For me it's not enough and i have millions of low ram crashes (even safari still crash very often) but of course that means nothing for other people. It really depends on your workflow. You can do of course great music with it but in my case it was the main reason to go away from iOS music. Even 2GB ram would be hard at the limit for me....
Limits can be nice but it also can break your workflow in a bad way.
But 4 synths isnt nearly enough to do a whole song. And if the Ipad air cannot cope with that then it is safe so say that the Ipad Air needs more memory to be a credible pad to make Music on.
And what is "Bounce synths down"?
@thedude said:
It depends what you are writing. 1 synth is enough to write a song if you've got skillz
Bouncing down means recording your synth to an audio file. The benefit of this is that afterwards you are not midi triggering a loaded synth patch but just playing an audio file. In the history of music bouncing down would also be used to get more than 4 tracks onto a 4 track tape recorder, the process is not new and has always been used to push boundaries in the face of technical restraints. Bouncing down has also helped create some of the unique sounds since recording artists started (either by the sounds being combined by post production i.e. Lee Scratch Perry)
iOS is NOT the same as a desktop - so workflow changes like this are generally required like committing a synth line to audio to free up memory. This is not necessarily a bad thing - I would bounce down synths on desktop to allow audio editing and post production on them anyway.
So again it is not about whether you can or not (cause you can - everyone on this forum is testament to that) - it depends on what workflows you can work with and whether the benefits outweigh the constraints. On that 2nd point - it is entirely subjective and only you can decide what makes it a credible pad for you to make music on.
how could 1 synth handle lead, bass, chords, piano at the same time? you use 1 synth for each of these. and recording all off the synths to audio just to hear them altogheter sounds pretty hefty to me. maybe its better to buy the next ipad air 2, it has got 2g of ram.
a 'song' can be written with a piano alone..
are there any official specs out for future ipads?
@thedude said:
You're absolutely right. I reckon the iPad needs about another 5 years worth of improvements and upgrades before any of us can make music on it. Do come back then and join in with all the music making we're going to do...
@PaulB said:
Haha, easy now. Obviously, I disagree with his statement that you "can't make music" with the iOS devices as is, but at the same time, he's absolutely right that the devices are under-powered for what they are trying to do. Particularly the older ones that have like 512MB of RAM (I think), but even the newer devices require a degree of caretaking.
Anything you have to worry about besides making music is a distraction from making music. On iPad2, it feels like almost half of my time is messing with things to get things to run smoothly enough to record. That may include: closing apps I'm no longer using; changing latency settings; using airplane mode or a cMemory cleaner (which may or may not actually work); and constantly thinking about which instrument and FX apps the device could realistically handle. It doesn't have to be like that. I don't think it's greedy to expect I should be able to open whatever I want and run basic chains of 2 or 3 apps.
But the flip side is that we deal with it because there's just enough of a mobile consumer base on this one particular App Store to warrant development of the fine selection of apps that we have. And they're insanely cheap for the functionality they provide.
@thedude said:
Could you please clarify why 4 synths isn't nearly enough when it's been proven since the 1st Moog that it can be done with one synth?
I don't "bounce" my synths, but I do track one at a time. So far, I'm easily tracking & mixing a dozen or so synth parts on any of my tunes on my Air. Hell, I've been doing that on my iPhone4g since last year.
Any one of my current tunes include loops from audio snippets of my trips overseas, live hand percussion, live bass guitar as well as synths on my iPadAir all season...so I'm also concerned about my music not being credible if my pad isn't credible.
:-/
...then again, my iOS experience has completely changed my perspective on music production.
No one says you aren't allowed to use other gear WITH the iPad. Where does the idea that an entire studio needs to be contained inside a little tablet come from?
Does a drum set have enough sounds to play an entire symphony on?
@thedude said:
Are you actually playing lead, bass chords and piano at the same time? I don't even think Rick Wakeman bothers in the studio. Myself, I've always tracked one at a time. Hell, I've been doing that since the 80s...but with my iPadAir, it's easier to just track the audio into my DAW rather than bother with MIDI(which many are quite successfully) and mix from there. BeatmakerII as my DAW makes dragging & dropping loops to make an arrangement quite easy. I'll mix in Auria, however, because I like the mixer and effects better.
Why do you need four synths loaded at the same time? Load, record, unload one at a time as you need them.
@thedude said:
Yes. But if you're looking for excuses as to why music can't be made , you'll have no trouble coming up with them. I've been much more productive since I got my iPad.
If you were trying to play four synths at the same time perhaps not. If you learn to mix the parts down to audio as has been suggested then there is plenty of power to get the job done.
BeatMaker 2 is for exampel very good for working around this RAM issues. I always used it in the past. You can record there track after track direct to audio and it can stream everything from disk. So i was able to record 50+ tracks for a song. I like to play and record my tracks live but if you need MIDI tracks a lot RAM could be a bottleneck. 512MB was enough for me on my iPhone 4, 1GB was amazing on my iPhone 5 but 1GB RAM on my iPad Air is real pain. Since the same apps also use for 64bit versions more RAM and compared to my iPhone 5 versions some seems to use 2X the RAM. For me the iPad Air was still a half step back and when they will increase it to 2GB (if they???) it will be one step forward.... so at best the iPad Air 2 will be a half step forward
It's usable...yes, but not for bigger projects!
I agree all over the place with @Cinebient. BM2 is how I've survived on iPad 2 but I've survived comfortably rarely needing to freeze or bounce tracks. 5 instruments built from desktop vsts all run at once without probs. Hard to upgrade with the whole 64bit thing. If I did it would be to an iPad 4.
"Has the Ipad Air enough ram to make music?"
Yes.
I made quite a lot of (complex)productions on ipad and i bet nobody could say"oh,that was made on ipad".Although it has not enough Ram to run EVERYTHING in realtime.It's still enough for a handful of synths/FX.I try to record the synths anyway when i made something satisfying with it because total recall (when working with IAA and/or AB) is still not very comfortable.If possible at all.Mini Retina here.
People used to - and some still do - make music quite acceptably on an iPad 1 (I still have one that I use - albeit these days for running a sequencer on.) If you mean, can you chain together 5 apps in Audiobus on it - then - no. But that's a different question. ;-)
I'm using an iPad 4 and Auria, a real RAM hog, and I really don't run into memory issues until I get to some really involved production, such as more than 24 tracks and high RAM apps like AD480 and AudioReverb etc... But even then I can get it done if I'm careful.
All it takes to deal with those issues is printing your reverb to a track, then no problem. Freezing tracks where possible too. I made many recordings on adats, da88's, 4 track cassette (with only a delay pedal, no other effects, and about $20 worth of mics). But those were fun times and very creative.
I mixed our entire album, some songs at 30+ tracks! all on auria. I'm currently mixing the new one as well. It can be done. For me, having everything on my ipad, instantly available so I can work wherever I am, is worth so much more than what I "can't" do. For years I used Linux to try to make music, stuck in the world of "my computer could theoretically run at 1ms latency and run many plugins," yet I never finished any mix or song on that platform. What I "COULD" do and what I ACTUALLY do makes such a difference. I'll figure out the workarounds to make it work.
@Thomas said:
You got it wrong. With your method you set a synth with the sound you want, then you play it and record this to a soundfile. When your done, you repeat until you have 4 soundfiles. And then you play this altogheter. This is not what i am talking about, im talking about the method Reason uses, all of the synths is in memory and is played in realtime, 1 synth for each track. This is what im looking for in Ipad.
@Zymos said:
Take a look at this Music program, it have ALL this in memory at once, and synths are played in realtime.
@thedude said:
That's just not going to happen right now with the current state of iPads so if you don't want to do what is known to work, I'd recommend sticking with Reason on a computer.
@thedude said:
Yeah, I see a bunch of hardware sitting next to the laptop- thanks for proving my point. Even with a computer there that can run Reason, whoever made the video is STILL using additional gear.
@Thomas said:
You dont record a synth to a soundtrack, nobody does that, that belonged to the 80s. Maybe you should take a look how a real musicprogram is meant to be. This program has ALL this in memory at once, every synth and effect is rendered in realtime based on what note should be played, no soundfile-recording what so ever.
@Zymos said:
I should choosed a more detailed explanation video, you dont have to have one single hardware at all to use Reason(except the computer), not even a MIDI keyboard, just use the keyboard, all of the sequencing, synths and effect is in the Program.
Well this is going nowhere fast.
I'm pretty sure everyone here is aware of Reason, and of multitrack recording in a DAW.
I guarantee you that even Reason users have to bounce tracks sometimes...
Then the answer to your original question is 'no'. I wish I had access to real music programs but until then my songs will be amateurish. Damn....
No point arguing what reason is capable of or correct use, just that the ipad is NOT the same.
@Zymos said:
No, i have used Reason for years, there isnt a such a thing as "bouncing". Every synth, effect is played in realtime when you play a full song, and you edit it in realtime also, no "recording" to a soundfile first or anything like that.
DFTT