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
0.o? It holds everything in RAM until you commit?
I honestly didn’t know if anyone else here would put catch it, but I’m over the moon you did. Dropout in general is the single best streaming service available. I think there are two total episodes of ALL of their series shows that I’ve said ‘eh’ and stopped it midway thru
Other than that, banger after banger after banger
My wife said early on ‘I haven’t looked forward to a weeknight airing since Parks & Rec was on Must See TV’ — and I can’t say I disagree
Will the MIDI clip editor have pitch/scale quantise features? Couldn't tell from the video.
It absolutely streams from disk.
SSD burnout is not an issue here.
Super badass update. Can't wait for a release!
I’m interested in this too. Could we hear direct from the dev?
So, if a major or minor update (not maintenance and bug fixes) comes within 12 months of your individual purchase date you pay nothing extra. Outside of the 12 months it’s the smaller Upgrade IAP for a further 12 months of updates. Got it.
We have never heard of an issue regarding this. People have used Loopy, Loopy HD and Loopy Pro professionally for many years.
Would be a game changer for me if I didn't already have 50 half-written songs in Drambo. How good is the song mode on Loopy Pro - is it possible to arrange 5-10 minute songs with ABACAB-type changes?
I don’t believe you are the dev. I’m interested in hearing direct from the developer thanks.
SSD is not going to be damaged by Loopy Pro, but it’s a fair question about write cycles
If that’s problematic for you disable “save points” I would think
(I’ll defer to @espiegel123 and @wim though)
Mac?
Eventually. No indication of when yet.
yes
The Mac version is a separate release and is being worked on in parallel with the iOS version. There are lots of bits and pieces specific to MacOS. Until the iOS version is out the door, the iOS version is the primary focus (and pretty much all of the iOS work also benefits the MacOS version) .
It is impossible to accurately predict the timeline..particularly when dealing with a new platform. Michael is hoping that the MacOS wrap up will move pretty swiftly once the iOS version is out the door (at which point the MacOS will be pretty far along).
Unless Edward has a side carreer I don't know about, neither of us would have any meaningful insight. I wouldn't expect Michael or any other app developer to have any special knowledge of that either. SSD technology is a highly specialized science.
I doubt Loopy does an abnormal amount of writing to disk. Generally for performance sake I would thing as much as possible would be done in Ram, only swapping to disk to disk when needed. At least that's how software engineers I worked with operated (back in the ol' magnetic disk days).
Yep ^^^ this!
Yes, I daresay virtual instruments that stream from ssd samples (and that's pretty much all of them except the 100% modeling apps) would use SSD cycles more than a "controlling" app.
What we're talking about here is a bit different than that though. With very few exceptions, iOS apps load all samples entirely into RAM once. This means that only as much data as can be handled in RAM can be used.
A few apps such as Loopy Pro and AudioLayer utilize swapping to disk. They load what they need into RAM, then intelligently swap in and out from disk storage as needed so that they can handle virtually unlimited amounts of data. This increases the reads and writes from the disk.
I very much doubt that adds significant degradation on modern SSD's but that's something that would require a highly specialized electronics expert to meaningfully comment on.
(fwiw, SSDs are used in highly disk intensive applications such as database servers everywhere in the world. Any load that Loopy Pro could generate is certainly orders of magnitude less than such an application. My personal opinion is this is not something to be concerned about.)
A few things.
I think iPads and iPhones use flash memory not SSDs for storage (though the same question may apply).
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I think we’d know if premature device burnout from running Loopy were a thing of concern.
Loopy, Loopy HD and Loopy Pro together have been around quite a long time with quite a lot of people using them heavily. If anything the pressure on earlier devices would be higher than current devices since current devices have more RAM. Loopy has always (or at least for quite a long time) been “disk” based. The internal storage on Phones and iPads in the old days would have been hit harder than current devices as they had less RAM.
Nothing about Loopy Pro would make it more likely to cause issues than any of the previous versions.
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Loopy definitely streams. I often create projects whose audio tracks far exceed available memory. (For those that don’t know streaming usually involves RAM buffers during recording and playback)
I’m very happy to let Edward speak for me, as he works with me. LP streams from disk; it’s never been an issue. Mountains, molehills come to mind 😄
You might be, I am not. I prefer to hear direct from the source. Organ grinders and monkeys come to mind 😄
I just thought it was an interesting question. However, the question wasn’t mine if you look. I was just interested in the answer.
I expect that’s true. Really, it was more a pondering than a deep worry. Also, I have no idea how most people actually use LP. I was thinking about it from the perspective of conventional “takes”… if someone does a lot of takes to get the loop they want, they’re eating write cycles. Or if they’re doing a lot of overdubbing.
But as most here have pointed out, it’s probably just not that big a deal. I don’t know if anyone’s taken a look at the effective lifetime of an iPad’s storage system, compared to that lifetime with regard to other factors. In fact, obsolescence probably does overtake it sooner.
Anyway, thanks for the considered responses here. I’m certainly looking forward to the big update.
It is an interesting topic. It's always helpful to understand things whether they're impactful or not.
Understanding how streaming / swap to disk works is key to putting it in perspective though. If something is constantly reading and writing to disk that's one thing. Most operations don't work that way though. It would be slow and, particularly in real-time audio applications, would be difficult to keep from causing buffer under runs (dropouts). RAM buffers have always been key to speeding up performance, with reads and writes to disk only happening when needed and in non real-time threads.
("disk" is a misleading term here, but it's what we're all used to. In an iPad or phone it's all solid state electronics - no physical disks are involved. We're really talking about non-volatile vs. volatile storage, non-volatile being slower "disk" storage.)
Shut the front daw! It’s cold in heeya
Looking forward to it Michael!
@wim That’s a good point, thank you. It illuminates a way of thinking that, even though I do know better, is still tied to older recording technologies. You’re right, of course… unlike analog tape recording, which continuously prints the signal, digital recording is never a byte-by-byte stream, constantly hammering the data cells, but is buffered and saved in chunks.
@garden : it is my understanding that the type of NAND flash memory used by iPads and iPhones has a life expectancy of something like 100,000 write cycles per storage cell.
Hardware loopers like the Boss RC series are also use flash memory. One doesn’t hear about people burning the memory out.
Hence why I defer to these two wonderful fonts of knowledge: I basically wanted to say what they did but didn’t want to be giving the wrong info directly (this way it’s indirect )
hahaha, I don't even own it yet...thought I'd wait til MacOS version, but MacBook Air is a bit disappointing so I might even jump back to iOS and run twin iPads
Thanks Michael. Good that wear isn’t an issue.