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.
Sampletank 4 Max v2 (desktop) offer…worth it?
IK Multimedia’s Sampletank 4 Max v2 is currently on offer on their website for €49.99 and if you have enough jam points on your account you can get roughly a further 15% off, coming out at €42.99.
This version includes the full Miroslav Philharmonik 2 and Sampletron instruments as well as many other add on packs.
Anyone have any thoughts or experience of Sampletank 4 and the quality of the sounds etc.? On the face of it, it seems like a great deal but maybe I’m missing something?
Comments
Its excellent and i got it last year
Thanks @dblonde, good to know. Cheers.
Got a really good review here https://www.musicradar.com/reviews/ik-multimedia-sampletank-4-max and that's when it was going for £600 so has to be a good deal at that price
Thanks @charalew. Yeah, all of the reviews I’ve found are generally positive and they are usually for version 1 of Sampletank 4 Max. V2, as far as i can understand added loads more content including the full versions of Syntronik 2, Sampletron 2 and Miroslav Philharmonik 2. Cheers.
God no.
I like some of IK’s stuff but ST4 is horrible, buggy and a nightmare to install and maintain.
And most of it sounds like a 2000s era ROMpler. In a bad way.
Syntronik is a waste of storage space, changing patches is slow and you can’t programme a patch from scratch like you can with an emulation, and the presets don’t tend to be anywhere near to my taste (which matters much less with an emulation as you can tweak sounds more comprehensively and make them from scratch).
Miroalav is awful. I don’t like Phil. Or his harmonica. Get the free BBC library from Spitfire instead. And then get some Originals when on sale. 10000x better. Spitfire originals epic strings, epic brass + epic percussion is a much better investment and actually sounds good. And inspiring. Miroslav wasn’t great when it was new and has been massively left behind.
Sampletron I do like however. It’s a very good Melotron, especially for lo-fi, grungy and warbly sounds. I use G-Force more though as it’s more stable and has a better UI/UX.
Even if I liked the sounds of ST4 (I don’t!) I wouldn’t keep it installed. Some of the content is really old and the installers haven’t kept up to date — it installs its own libraries in the wrong folders which causes ST4 to crash (they didn’t bother coding safeguards to make sure content is where it’s expected). When I first got ST4 I spent a full day manually putting the files where they should go, but then an update messed it all up again. And that stopped ST4 loading and now it’s dead to me lol.
And despite the app looking like it supports multiple sample locations (it lets you add as many as you like) it doesn’t. And will probably crash if you’re dumb enough to want your sample library on an external drive.
Apart from Sampletron the only library I quite liked was Shipwreck piano. But that’s basically any old piano through a massive reverb. Spitfire intimate + FAC Alteza easily bests it.
And then IK will stiff you on upgrade prices and their reps will basically blame you for having spent too little on their apps if you mention it online — as the current Gearspace thread on T-Racks 6 will confirm.
IK hate their customers.
Apart from that… lol
I agree with your SampleTank assessment. It's not worth it. I recently got the Miroslav Philharmonik for free and found it unusable with the horrendous SampleTank software. I immediately deleted it.
On the other hand, I quite like IK's MODO Drums and MODO Bass. So... not all of their software is a complete waste.
I never said all od their software was a complete waste.
I’m finding MODO Bass 2 to be really buggy. I may see if I can reinstall v1 which didn’t seem as bad. I get loads of stuck notes with BASS 2.
MODO Drum is nice, apart from cymbals and hats. I mainly use it just for the snares. Which I like a lot.
T-Racks has a few good modules (specifically the tapes, the tape delays and Sunset Sound), and mixbox is excellent.
I can live without Amplitube. I quite like using some of the pedals on their own but the UI is awful for doing that. I don’t like the sound of the amps that much. I tend to prefer the more subtle amps in Logic. I like kuassa’s VOX emulation too.
I don’t like IK as a company though. They do too many user hostile things.
@klownshed, thank you so much for taking the time to give such a full opinion - lots of food for thought there! Potential negative opinions on Sampletank like yours are precisely why i asked the question so it’s really useful to hear.
By the way, I certainly agree that the free Spitfire BBC Discover is amazing - i even wrote to them suggesting that, with such a small size in mb, they bring it to mobile.
Cheers.
Thanks @NeuM. I also got the Miroslav Philharmonik CE for free last year. After installing it yesterday, it seems to work okay with the free version of the Sampletank software? When using it’s own vst in fl Studio though, it took ages to get the interface to be a usable size - initially, it was tiny! Cheers.
I forgot to ask @klownshed, given your experience regarding performance issues, are you on Mac or PC?
I gather IK stopped their ridiculous ‘limited time to download instruments and then pay again to access them’ policy last year? What other user hostile things do they do that I’ve not heard about?
Mac. It’s not so much performance issues (although the plugin is very slow to load) more one of reliability. It’s poorly coded with respect to basics like file management. It will crash if you point to the wrong folder in the settings pane rather than put up an alert saying files missing.
The IK product manager will hang/crash if you have the download location set to an external drive and don’t have the drive mounted.
This is basic computer science stuff. A first week student learns to check that a directory you’re writing to actually frikkin exists! So lazy.
ST is a real hassle to install. IK don’t make it painless. And it’s really not worth the pain. lol.
The user hostile behaviour is easy to track down. I can’t think of a developer that creates as much drama.
In the past they’ve done group buys that can cost a lot to buy into, yet days after that ends they put the total studio max on sale for less than the price of the buy in, instantly pissing off a huge chunk of their new customers.
Their upgrade deals are terrible for existing customers. It’s usually cheaper to wait for a sale and buy the whole total studio again than upgrade. And if you do buy the sale version they’ll probably release the new version the week after the sale ends with no upgrade path.
Their installers, such as T-Racks, install everything even if you only own one plugin — they don’t give you an option to only install what you own. Have only one plugin? Every time you update it they’ll install the other 60 odd that you don’t have which you’ll have to go and find and delete. And they’ll install every version of every plugin (vst, AU, vst3, AAX…) They put shops in the plugins and fill the UI of some of their plugins with stuff you probably don’t own to try and make you buy more stuff… sledge hammer marketing over user experience every time.
Just google IK and you won’t be far from finding a thread where their official reps will insult forum members who dare ask questions online about anything I’ve mentioned...
Well, I'm glad you're able to make use of it. It wasn't my cup of tea.
To be fair I recognise some of this. The IK manager software insists on creating a directory called Music and Audio on my PC for example. So yeah they're frustrating to deal with but some of the actual software (Modo Bass etc) is best in class.
Thanks again @klownshed, really interesting insights. Yes, i knew ‘performance issues’ was the wrong way to describe what you referred to but couldn’t think of a more pertinent term at the time!
As i said, plenty of food for thought and some Googling to be done! Many thanks.
Thanks @charalew. Yes, even after just installing Miroslav CE and the free version of Sampletank, i can appreciate the installers are frustrating and the vst interfaces lack attention to detail regarding scaling! But the sounds themselves are pretty good in my opinion (i can understand why Miroslav splits opinion but i don’t think the sounds are bad per se, just ‘softer’ than more modern libraries).
I’m going to try installing the samples to external drive to see whether there are problems accessing them as @klownshed suspects there might be.