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.
Comments
Tera Pro. ID700.
Looking at comments on YT and elsewhere I think this might be a controversial opinion, but right now I'm really digging TB Lowtone.
Other favorites right now include ID700, Nambu, and TB Flowtones. Perennial favorites include Zeeon, the Moog apps, and Bram Bos's apps. For effects I keep going back to Bleass apps and Caelum apps.
The iOS ecosystem is an embarrassment of riches though, there are so many great apps that I haven't mentioned here.
Tier 1 (most used)
Loopy Pro, Drambo, Nembrini FaceMan, Nambu, Tera Pro, Hilda, Ruismaker FM, House Mark 1
Tier 2 (less frequently used)
Koala, AUM, KQ Dixie, Pure Acid, miRack, ZenBeats
Tier 3 (Love 'em but rarely use 'em)
Sector, Fractal Bits, Yukawa, iELECTRIBE, SunVox, Model D
Honorable mention
BeBot!
Koala.
AUM.
Ableton Note.
SampleWiz 2.
Spectrum.
Wotja.
PaulXStretch.
Reels.
K7D (iOS).
Other Desert Cities (iPadOS).
Stratosphere.
Blackhole.
Cascade.
Trinity.
If I had to choose just one — Koala.
Trooper is fantastic! Probably my favorite of all their synths.
Endlesss
Are people not liking Lowtone? I’ve mentioned it in my recent favorites as well. I didn’t realize it’s been poorly received. I think it’s fantastic. Love the Bleass and Caelum effects as well.
I bought way too many app lately. I am still trying to learn them all.
My favorite at the moment are Piano Motif, Beat scholar, Ba-1 and Monolit.
Loopy Pro, Logic and Koala
I think my favorite is FL Studio mobile
I saw a couple YT videos where a lot of the comments were to the effect of “meh, it’s just another monosynth with bass presets” which I frankly don’t get. The VCN is almost worth the price of admission itself, the gate function is a ton of fun, the effects section is very serviceable and the oscillators sound great. Not everyone agrees. To be fair I’m a sucker for multi-oscillator monosynths
Off the top of my head...
*Nanostudio 2 - it's what I produce most of my beat-based productions in.
*AUM - it's what I produce my live Ambient in as well as capture miRack output in.
*Logic Pro for iPad - it's what I use for mastering EPs, recording and cleaning up and tuning vocals, time-stretching stems, and other utility-based things. I might return to it for creative purposes, but I find it easier than Cubasis 3. That's only based on my own workflow. You're mileage may vary.
*Romplers - Beathawk, Module Pro, and Pure Synth Platinum 2
*Synths - Obsidian (see NS2), Sunrizer, Zeeon, Lowtone, Troublemaker
*Effects - TB Reverb, MagicDeathEyeStereo, True Pan, TB Barricade, TB Reelbus
*miRack - The most fun I've had in a long time with making sounds. My output is currently very noobish, but the fun isn't in trying to create a polished production or something mindblowing. The fun is in picking out modules and hooking them up. All those wires! Wee!
*ProCreate - Sometimes I opt to create my own album art rather than have it AI-generated. Even if it's AI-generated, I alter the colours and such and add text in ProCreate to finish the cover.
*Spotify - For listening to Lofi, Ambient, Jean-Michel Jarre, and half-hearted attempts to listen to overcompressed modern EDM occur.
*Youtube - It's where production tutorials, travel vlogs like "Kara & Nate" and "Trek Trendy" and "Travel Alone Idea", music I can't find on Spotify, and gameplay videos for the upcoming "Mortal Kombat 1" game exist.
*DoorDash - For when I'm deep into a production session and can't be faffed to cook my own meal. 😂
*Gadget - For when I'm feeling like rekindling my fondness for the app.
Buttersynth, trooper, AUM, FF q3
New Stuff:
Classics:
So right (besides Pianoteq v8)…
But, 75% of all iPhone/iPad users can’t differ the system apart, so, when people talking about iOS i assume that it can be whatever… 🤥🤥
Yes, I would say, in general, the term iOS is still often used as a blanket term for both. Otherwise, let's say you were making ipad music, you'd technically have to say 'I'm an iPadOS and iOS musician', which sounds a bit ridiculous.
When Apple decided to make an special version for iPad then they should been rename it to iPhoneOS respectively iPadOS…
AUM, Cubasis, NanoStudio 2, all the Nembrini pedals & amps,Riffler, Piano Motifs, many of the *Bud apps, Pensato, Tonality, Tonaly, Scaler 2, Piano Motif and Riffler
Hilda… so good.
I was attempting to "rib" you a little bit over a comment in the iOS needs thread (since the title of this thread is What are your favorite current iOS apps?):
First, iOS is iPhone, iPadOS is something different from iOS - important to use the right terminology.
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/56481/ios-needs/p2
King Of Bass by AudioKit is my new all time favorite. I’ve been wanting or more like crying for a real Sub 808 Bass style app to make sub 808s and there wasn’t any until today. AudioKit came through right when I needed it. There’s no other 808 app like it. This was a long time coming. Here’s my quick list of favorite or most used apps, it’s not complete and there not ranked. I like all the apps I have and there’s not any that I don’t like. And I’m positive I’ll be missing a lot of them. It’s a quick list
AudioKit King Of Bass
AudioKit Synth One
Most AudioKit apps
Cubasis 3
GarageBand
ZENBEATS
DawnBeat
Lo-Fi Tape by Weston Fletcher
Decent Sampler
Pure Synth
FM Tines
Octane AUV3
Animoog Z
SynthMaster One’s
Mela4
Audio Evolution Mobile
OverDrive Synth
World Piano by TAQS.IM
Beef by CaelumAudio
Bleass Slow Machine (maybe #1 effect)
KNOCK
Rozetta
KoalaFX
DigiStix 2
MelodyBud
Endlesss (I use this quite a lot)
StepPolyArp
BeatHawk
Atom Piano Roll
Korg Module Pro
Choric
AUM
Hilda
Noises
Koala
Rymdigare
AUM
FRMS
FAC Alteza
Decent Sampler (despite all it's faults)
MiRack
Velvet Machine
Rozeta
Pure Piano
I like the cyber-Westie in your new profile pic!
I don’t have a favorite app.😎 But most used ones atm are:
AUM / Drambo / Helium / Velocity Keyboard / Tonality / Midi Tape Recorder
Atom 2 should be there on the list, but fear of abandoned apps is stronger so Helium took his position.
I asked Dall-E for a westie in the style of H.R. Giger and this is what it produced...
Brilliant haha
Wish this was AUv3 😂 My inner child loves it
https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/singing-fingers-hd/id424724387
Top 50 here we go!
Edit: forgot the king. Koala. No challengers. It just does the thing. As much about what it can’t do as what it can. Fun and also deadly serious. Buy it. Start finishing your projects again.
Elsa - granular sampler, stick a lemon d pad in there from one of the sample packs and it’s instant Lee Gamble.
Dr Om - hacked synth pedal with no midi or keyboard input. Sounds amazing. Bit like a modular but for people with lives.
Yamaha FM Essential - 100 % free DX style synth with a twist. Sound is unbelievable. Free!
Caelum Dustbin - auv3 reverb model based on the inside of a wheelie bin. £0.99
4a. Caelum everything else. So good. Such good value. Thank you @CaelumAudio. Fave is Beef, although rumour has it that the Xmas themed version sounds a little bit more tinsely and I think it’s true. Buy both.
(Koala can import video straight to pads, chopped, so you can get going quickly)
Designed by someone who clearly did too many e’s. Bit clunky but has a few really nice quirks. Good for building a beat quickly. Nice sample import options.
Amiga style tracker which is modelled on one of the original programmes. Anyone who can understand those things is clearly a grass. But. Load in a sound and hit boost 15 times then enjoy the results. Saturates like a proper Amiga, very very convincing.
Ok this one took a second to get my head around but Unfiltered make very very good stuff. It’s a modern reverb which can modulate the decay tail in response to the input signal. Takes a second to master but it’s really nice once you figure it out.
Modular’s gash.
All of it sounds the same.
They bleed you for cash to get the bits and pieces but it’s really good. Kinda Ableton without the slightly annoying ‘have you ever been to Berghain’ archness.
Casio 8-bit keyboard sampler with all the charm and fuzz of the og. Make that Skwee LP. Tru Thoughts will give you a big cheque for it.
All free. All sick. Amp model, analog kick (never use them, modular bros love that kind of thing, but still, free) CHOWTapeModel etc etc. free.
Exists as an au as well. Models the MPC60 a-d circuits very well. (Although if youve ever used a 60 you’ll know that the results vary wildly. Use on pads for a bit of ageing or rim shots for that extra skwark.)
Voice changer with added sound fx and background rocket noise. Good for annoying your friends. You’re a musician, you don’t have any.
Does the thing. Zero application other than for that particular thing. No don’t stick it on the drums, they sound shit.
Adware that probably has a Swat team turning up at your house if you use it too much.
Veers dangerously close to something resembling an actual piece of real computer software. Annoyingly sounds pretty good. Buggy as hell. IK Multimedia are crooks. Owned by Fender, says it all.
Free for 5 mins then you pay but you can save your setting. So free.
The best compressor plug-in ever made for desktop now on iOS. Free. So good.
Single dial compressor from a Japanese major label funded software offshoot. One of those auto-gain-makeup jobs but if your mix is up to scratch this is a completely satisfactory replacement for Matt Colton (My Cousin Vinnie if he was a mastering bod).
For the effects you’ll need a host app. I’ll lay it down - Cubasis isn’t the cheapest (£30 ish) but it’s overall the best by a country mile. Steinberg kept getting better and better while we all betrayed them and joined the Logic gravy train but all their stuff is exceptional.
Late night alone with your iPhone and an edit of The Nine which is on its knees begging you reach for the App Store.
It’s an Electribe… and a Waldorf Wave style synth all in one. Sound is playdough, completely commercial and also quite beautiful. Ability to load your own samples and wave tables makes it a must. Also like other Korg stuff it then becomes accessible in Gadget as a module. £30 well spent.
Hainbach aka Audio Thing is into early early electronics so this is a model of a wire recorder, deployed by in WW2. Does delay, phase, distortion and also if you hit the right button it will feed in random samples of Germans talking on the radio from that era. Let’s just say I haven’t translated the bits coming through,
All models of the same ish gear. Bit of a faff to match the levels for non- guitars. (I have no idea what a real guitar sounds like through these). All expensive, all pretty good. Lots of nice stuff to choose from and some rackmount gear to boot.
Modular is all digital anyway so may as well have it in the box. Does presets. End of.
The actual Synclavier company’s own port of the Synclavier sound.
The same begging on their knees original units (DX7, Oberheim - did anyone ever want an Oberheim really? - Prophet) sampled through VHS, some kind of fuzz pedal signal path and finally the chips inside the Sega Genesis. Pricey, limited use, a bit of a faff, but nice to zone out to for a couple of hours.
It’s horribly expensive (£50 ish) but it’s really well done. Bread and butter sounds multi sampled and layered etc. Very conservative but generally what I reach for if I need a synth that sounds convincing.
Triton Library comes bundled. End of. Bit pricey but you use it loads.
29 David Rouchaix drum machines.
Complete luxury. Don’t do auv3 or Inter-App Audio so you have to fiddle around a bit to get the recording but they look and sound great. Mixture of CR 78 style stuff and guitar pedal drum machines.
30 logic iPad
Sounds like it’s more or less the same deal as the desktop app. As usual they’ve bootstrapped the mobile version to protect their precious laptop sales so there’s a few things missing but easy to work around. Kinda defeats the point of the fun of mobile music action as you’re back on the old grey screen grind. Cubasis almost certainly better as it’s had years of fixes and user feedback polls.i
You already own it but it’s essential for moving your audio between different apps. Tags and Favourites are your friends - use them. Beware the Safari downloads folder, if you download a load of samples via safari move them out of there pronto because it occasionally voids itself unexpectedly, like your Grandmother.
Buggy and confusing. Some apps insist on using it to import and export files. Usually here’s a way around it though. Avoid wherever possible,
Horrible, terrible piece of shit. Necessary very occasionally for transferring files if you want to avoid iTunes file sharing which is even worse. Usually can be avoided.
The memory bottleneck on mobile devices is a problem. It means that transferring stems, for example, usually ends in a SWAT team turning up at one of your previous addresses. Wetransfer boards seems to be the next solution for moving files on mobile without having to zip them. Often the zipping is where the trouble starts. Dropbox and gdrive the main offenders here. iCloud is a cloud storage solution but you can’t share the links. Thanks Apple. Thanks a bunch.
Yeah fuck you too. But seriously the ability to batch rename stuff if you’re working with audio is a godsend. Has all kinds of applications. The free version does it as well I believe.
Theres no good audio editor for iOS that isn’t a daw. Hokusai is the closest. You can multi up to 50 tracks and there are a number of useful operations it can facilitate like insert silence, crop silence, trim to start and end, print with effect and export. Just be gentle with it, if you start doing things too quickly it tends to spasm.
Pay for it like the rest of us. Of course you need that window playing while you surf twitter watching as another DJ puts their career on the line so they can drop a conspiracy theory about Covid and the guy who runs Warp.
Crucially has an effective download mechanism for large files which means that they don’t get lost as they often do with safari. Firefox is for grasses.
Yeah yeah wires etc. it’s still just a synth. But credit to the children of Dr Bob it’s very well done and if you’re after that one off booming squelch it’ll deliver in spades.
Virsyn is a weird company. Their stuff is like marmite on pancakes. With extra yeast. It all sort of works but is liable to buckle under even the slightest hint of pressure. Audio Layer feels like a computer app really, ported to iOS. It’ll do a load of useful stuff like load soundfonts (good format, tiny files, sound cheap and great), exs instruments (just don’t expect it to play nice if you try to do too much at once), and it also will let you ‘create’ sampler insruments on various formats.
Free (!) port of various Mutable Instruments modules. No I don’t know either but they sound fine. Also technically not modular so you are safe from the Sex Offenders register for the time being…
If I was going to persuade someone of the benefits of iOS wares I would refer to the ease of use when it comes to MIDI and audio connectivity. Everything can be an input and an output. Anyway that opens the door for lots of generative MIDI apps. They’re good. Chain an arpeggiator and a chord quantiser together, add some velocity scaling, modulate the note length with an lfo and you’ve got something resembling a human piece of playing. Cheats, basically, so good. Also cheap.
Does what it says on the tin. Jamie Liddel endorsed. Something a bit like Kontakt. Coding etc. In app purchases are a bit pricey but they do the job.
Roli - clearly a front for a drug business as who the hell buys those things but as a free (!) app it’s fun to play. Just don’t use it on anything that you intend to play to anyone else.
Highly limited version of the real thing but you can load in your own samples and get a tune started in minutes. Goes deeper than you think if you explore.
MIDI lfo. Modulate this with that and then you’ve got a decent source for your automation that doesn’t involve you drawing and then redrawing curves until you want to die.
Adware which probably will lead to you ending up in a wikileaks doc at some point but it makes an airhorn. Worth it.
The only good drum synth. Ever. Makes mental noisy sounds. Fun, cheap.
One for that hour long time stretch of Eric Cantona’s bit about the seagulls.
50.DeeEQ
Two sliders : high or low and amount. Every eq should be like this .
No numbers.
The end.
Edit: new entry and something somewhere in this is Wavebox. I prefer it to Hokusai. Just needs an ‘export all’ function.