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
Thnx for sharing that Rob, interesting to get this perspective. Oh, you can do cross platform bundle deals? That would seem an ideal option. Don't have concrete data on it but if the iOS-only people are not the majority of iOS app buyers, they're certainly a large portion, and don't want to be paying a premium for x-platform compatibility that is no use to them
It’s almost as if this app is not aimed at iOS users.
Let’s hope the lack of Mac DAW support is fixed soon, otherwise that market will be as unimpressed as this one at the current price tag.
LOL.
Have you ever watched a Gavinski video?
He's always saying developers could do "this" better or they should implement "that" feature.
I'd hardly call that "kissing developer's arses".
On the other hand, that model which made the App Store a big hit straight away when it all started was mostly in terms of games of the Angry Birds ilk, the new mobile game market was already burgeoning prior to smartphones but was getting too unwieldy for featurephones – the App Store tied it all together so that piracy was almost not worth the bother, buying and paying was all centralised, and it could be re-downloaded with ease if you changed your phone
The drive to cater for eg £5 apps was great for Candy Crush type of apps, but as we’ve all seen, it took Apple a considerable time to even take music creation apps seriously – in fact, any creative apps at all – it was all centred around consumption apps and that’s why the pricing is what it was, but for creative apps, this was all totally inappropriate from the start
Well, that's how I'm reading this from the dev docs:
Apps that are part of a universal purchase, which lets customers easily enjoy your app and in‑app purchases across platforms, count as just one app in the bundle.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/app-bundles/
So to me at least, it implies that the bundle can include the same app(s) for different platforms too. Disclaimer - I haven't tried it myself, but I agree, it seems ideal.
this does look super cool though. Those short videos sound amazing. Also the fact that he’s allowing us to play with it for 15 minute spurts is super cool. I’m gonna have to try it out tonight with the OP-XY.
I have to record a video about this, cataloguing my failures and how I have no idea what's going on. (With the app, not my life. Although...)
The aftermath….
4 in the US Music App Store. Considering the pricing complaints, very interesting 🤔
I’m going to try to sidestep all the drama and just say that this sequencer does a lot of stuff that I absolutely love. I’m finding it surprisingly intuitive despite how weird it can get.
I'm using it on the mac (standalone already works there, just no plugin version yet). It was late at night when I got it, so I only tried the example presets so far, but its already worth it for me as it breathes so much fresh life into all the soft and hard synths I already own. My hope after my first impression is that its going to enable me to make the sort of music I always wanted to make with synths, so the price happened to be worth it for me.
Anyway according to the store its on intro pricing at the moment and is due to go even higher. "25% off until July 1st".
Is this by revenue? Seems unlikely that many people are still buying forScore. For me, it just shows how dead the market is despite how many great apps there are out there.
The history is complex but I would say that it wasnt app prices from a users perspective that changed the way things went. It was largely a combination of other factors, very much including Apple changing aspects of the hardware over time, and some users ending up wondering if they actually liked touchscreens, struggling to integrate ipads into their larger studio setup, etc. If pricing was a key factor, this applies to developers far more than users, eg they didnt get enough revenue to justify ongoing development.
Let me put it this way. If I wanted to imagine a parallel universe where things evolved quite differently, the price of apps would not be the key variable I would have changed in order to imagine that world, at least not from the angle of the users. Rather, I would have imagined a world where aspects of the hardware and its port connectivity remained stable for longer, enabling more of the sort of 'add on hardware that docks to the ipad and adds useful ports and knobs etc' that we started to see in the early days but that quickly faded away once the connector port changed. And I would also have needed to imagine that the plugin/inter-app stuff, along with more host apps came sooner than it actually did. Likely I would probably also need to imagine a world where more people embraced tablets for a wider range of tasks than was actually the case. When it comes to price sensitivities and people embracing tablets, it would also have helped if the Android platform hadnt been so fragmented and riddled with latency issues that it struggled to develop a music apps ecosystem in the way iOS did. Because there were plenty of people for whom the cost of the ipad versus a cheaper tablet would have been the original issue.
When it came to variables that affected sustainability, it would be wrong of me to only look at it from the simplistic perspective of certain users. Instead, I would need to consider sustainability from a developer point of view, and from a media point of view. Developers needed help with income sustainability. And sections of the media were sensitive to Apples removal of their ability to do affiliate link stuff.
And as a user I need to consider not just the initial price I have to pay, but the survival and evolution of apps I love. It costs me more in lost productivity and future hassle if apps get abandoned. So I would rather pay more to increase the chances that the apps I love and rely on carry on getting updates.
Its very unlikely that app prices had anything to do with the fact that the 'Sonic Touch' show that Sonicstate did came to an end a long time ago. That was far more likely to have been down to the priorities and available time of the member of that team that actually brought the ipad and exciting apps to the party, along with their desire to keep shelling out on new ipads at a time when ipad was evolving rapidly, balanced against how many viewers that show got compared to other stuff Sonicstate did. And when judging that final point, we have to keep in mind that a sizeable chunk of the music production audience were actually never onboard with the ipad in the first place, they often werent driven away, they simply never embraced it (or the tablet form factor for 'serious work' in general) in the first place. We still see evidence of this today, when ipad-related music news gets mentioned on shows that dont focus on the ipad. Often times many of the hosts have absolutely no idea how the ipad scene has evolved at all, because their own ipad experiences were either zero or involved incredibly casual use of tablets a long time ago. Its not unusual to find hosts whose last experience with an ipad for music was dabbling with a couple of apps in the ipad 1 or 2 era. And it certainly wasnt the price of apps that drove them away. And because they are out of touch with the scene, they arent well-placed to make judgements about the current scenes pricing at all, and dont even try.
You’d be surprised!! For Score is ALWAYS #1 but a few apps have taken the crown briefly as of late
I believe rankings are based on downloads within the last day
I've been thinking more about these sorts of shows and their hosts recently, and how unfortunate it is that there is a pretty hard split between those that cover ipad news and those that are totally out of touch with it and put all their news etc focus into hardware and software for desktop platforms.
Because quite a lot of show hosts have had reasons to embrace Apple silicon macs in recent years. But because they are totally out of touch with the ipad music app scene, they are mostly missing out on the small emerging world of apps which run on mac as well as ipad for no additional cost. If this stuff takes off a bit more, there is perhaps an opportunity to close the gap between these two world. A few 'killer apps' of interest might help. Fugue Machine Rubato could potentially fall into that category.
@SteveElbows fantastic nuanced post, thank you
Douche bag comment of the month,,,,,,
https://media1.giphy.com/media/S7B7Ic119EgGZwzDQI/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952txul9bz9b4u3rqw569cmgimte1q372zn1e490mmt&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g
As an admin of the Top iOS music group on Facebook, I’d have to disagree. If anything..the iOS music production scene is growing everyday! We see at least 120 new users per week
I really do find it baffling that so few people take iOS music production seriously. I’ve got tens of thousands worth of hardware and have been making music for 30 years. The iOS ecosystem is filled with such a broad array of great, innovative tools at ridiculously low prices.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got a DAW/desktop setup and plenty of hardware too. But my iOS music gets plenty of positive engagement when I post it.
I think people just aren’t aware that stuff like Drambo and Loopy Pro exist. I think a large chunk of the people spending thousands to go DAWless would have a much better time if they grabbed Loopy Pro and a couple plugins.
Definitely. The lack of headphone jack and shortage of ports is one of the main issues, but there are a lot of pros to making music on an iPad too. Some desktop people make an informed decision not to use iPad, but most have no idea at all that there is even a plugin system, for example
And some simply don't want to re-buy the all plug-ins and apps they already have on the desktop/laptop...
...manufacturer support (ie. control apps for the audio-interfaces) for higher-end audio-interfaces to create headphone monitor mixes or do some routing is also close to non-existent and it's not like it can't be done as driver-kit has been around for almost 4 years allowing custom audio-drivers...
I'd still argue that something like 'macOS Touch' for the iPad (ie. technically macOS but with dedicated TouchUI) could change things as it would allow users who wish to do so install their existing plug-ins, drivers and apps etc. on the iPad.
Silicone Macs can already run a bunch of of iOS apps when the developers don't intentionally block them...
Personally I've cut down on getting new apps and will likely move back to macOS for the majority of audio-related tasks.
Some chunk of them would, but for others its all about the nature of interfaces and workflow and what they think those interfaces do to the 'mode their brain is in when trying to create music'. Similar arguments are made when favouring hardware synths over softsynths.
At its simplest, some may describe their DAWless (and hardware synth, groovebox etc) urges as being down to 'I dont like using a computer'. But dig deeper and they usually mean they dont like using a mouse, or there are aspects of the DAW paradigm that they dont like. Given the number of hardware devices that really contain a computer these days, what they mean is that they want a highly specialised and focussed physical interface and workflow. They want to feel like they are using a specialised music computer rather than a general purpose computing platform, even if a there is really still general purpose computing going on under the hood.
If we factor in the fact that some people that dont like to use a mouse also wont like a touchscreen, and that 'options paralysis' stemming from having too much choice can get in the way of some peoples creativity, I'm not too surprised that the ipad doesnt seem like an answer for all of those people either.
Purely personally, if I could merge the standalone Push 3 with an ipad and the motorised knobs of the Melbourne Roto-Control into one unit with very well thought out workflow and physical controls, that would be the best device for me. I dont suffer from options paralysis, so I want the ipad side of things to give me more choice of synths, sequencers, fx etc than 'grooveboxes' tend to provide. And I'm not allergic to touchscreens, as long as I can augment them with other physical controls too. Some others are already happy with stuff like that minus the ipad, and with their preferred workflow, restricted choice of instruments, fx, sequencers etc, whether that be via Elektron or MPC or whatever.
Trying to drag this back to the main topic of this thread, the stuff on the Fugue Maschine Rubato roadmap that I need the most does relate to the user interface. There are all sorts of functions that I will want to control with physical knobs and buttons in future, effectively giving me a 'hardware version' of this fascinating sequencer, where I only use the touchscreen for aspects best suited to that form of interface.
All day, every day! ☺️
My point is basically that if people can’t see the potential in this very unique app, in the sense of actually creating new types of music and exploring new ideas, why complain about the price?
I’m pretty sure we all here have like 20 different reverbs, 15 delays, 10 granular effects 😅 etc. - But how many of these actually come to use on a regular basis?
Isn’t there like 4-5 different versions of Mutable Instruments Rings on iOS?
There is nothing like Fugue Rubato, kinda similar things are possible with Drambo when it comes to Fugue Classic.
Same with Squarp Hapax when it comes to Fugue Classic.
Squarp Hapax is 1080€ though and I doubt it well ever do what Fugue Rubato does.
And even if it does in some future firmware update, it is still 1080€ 😉
Beetlecrab Tempera is unique in the realm of granular and given its layout and features it would be so great with something similar for the iPad, don’t you think?
Would you have a problem with buying an iPad app similar to Beetlecrab Tempera for 149€?
I certainly wouldn’t! 😍
The thing is, Tempera is 838€…
So I’m willing to save cash and sell some gear to get my hands on it.
And that is my whole line of reasoning, if people REALLY want Rubato and sees its potential, accept the price and skip buying a few new releases that do pretty similar things to the apps one has already bought.
If anything it was the IK Multimedia iOS apps that started with really high prices several years ago. Nothing special and not justified, only ports of their desktop versions - which they have now discontinued(!)
They couldn’t even bother bringing MODO Drum to iOS.
But yeah all in all, I’m apparently full of myself for acknowledging that certain software and gear with unique features is a little more tempting to spend money on than ten cheap 5€ apps all doing similar things. ☺️
This! From my DAWless friends, nobody knew Loopy Pro but were baffled by the flexibilty and fun when I showed them. They told something in the line of "while everybody argues that this or that is the future of hardware/grooveboxes, you've got Loopy Pro doing it seemingly all already". I do not mean to say that hardware is irrelevant, I use my fair share myself as it hits differently, but it just shows how unknown it is in the music production world.
The headphone jack removal is something I should have mentioned in one of my previous lengthy posts, and I know some people for whom that was the straw that broke the camels back. In many cases they were already going cold on the ipad platform/ecosystem and form factor for other reasons though, otherwise they would have been more likely to tolerate the use of a suitable dongle to solve all the port issues.
I could further try to merge some of these other concepts back into the Fugue Machine topic by inviting people to consider how much some people are prepared to pay for AIR and NI etc plugins for modern MPC hardware in order to add some new capabilities to their devices.
The psychology of pricing is complicated. On the ipad its been massively affected by the sort of prices people got used to paying in earlier phases.
And in some contexts the phenomenon can be reversed. eg there are some scenarios where the traditionally low pricing actually negatively impacted some peoples perceptions of whether some of this stuff belongs in a pro music environment, what value they attach to these apps and plugins, etc. Set the scene (and the hardware/platform/interface) differently and there are things out there that would still be considered great value even if they cost far more than they currently do in ipad software form. I am putting Fugue Machine Rubato in this category.
Yup, it’s not hard to spend $59 for a meal for three at Chipotle
In terms of the actual app: I’m excited to pick it up. I’m waiting for the bundle to go through but I’m itching to give it a go. The original Fugue is such a cool concept and easy to get things up and running. It was easy for things to start sounding stale, so adding dynamics like this will be really fun to play with.
On the topic of pricing: I’d be happy to pay more for premium apps especially if it leads to more stability. Better to have a stable app at a higher price point than one that sounds cool for 20 minutes before crashing.
I like how Pixquare offers two price points for iPhone and iPad. iPhone is $7.99, iPad is $17.99 and both is $20. Something like that seems like it would be good in this case with separate purchases for iOS, iPadOS, or MacOS and a super bundle for all. There was a discussion on pricing for Dialekt between iOS and iPadOS and there was mention of this not being possible but maybe I misunderstood that discussion.
Pixquare App:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixquare-pixel-art-studio/id1659428179
I wonder if the better move would be to advertise this as a Mac centric app with iOS support. It’s weird to release at a price that would be a good bargain on Desktop but is crazy (in some people’s eyes) on iOS while not having AUv3 support on Mac implemented out the gate.
Off topic, but @Rob_Jackson_Music just want to fanboy and tell you how great your apps are. So glad you’re active on the forums beyond discussions related to your products.