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.
Reverse Artist Spotlight: Michael, and the story behind Loopy Pro
It’s me, in the thing:
By popular demand, in this conversation one-woman band Inby flips the Artist Spotlight thing around and interviews me about my own journey. We cover my childhood in the hills of Melbourne Australia, falling in love with coding on an Apple 2 as a kid, and how that “special interest” never really stopped. I talk about my early days building software, studying computer science, and almost, almost finishing a PhD before trading academia for life on the road in a motorhome across Europe with my wife.
I share stories about my first app “The Cartographer,” how Google killed its API overnight, and how that led me to take another crack at an old looping app experiment. We dive into how Loopy evolved from a hack inspired by Imogen Heap, to Loopy HD, and then to Audiobus, the software that turned iOS into a real music platform, and how Apple invited me to WWDC to politely tell me they'd closed off the system I was using. Gulp.
We also talk about the long, public gestation of Loopy Pro: building an action system that could handle everyone’s requests, dealing with a patent scare that made me develop in private, and the reality of seven years of solo dev work in the midst of parenting. I describe my slightly embarrassing low-prep, “output-only” work style, my love of DSP challenges like auto-loop detection, and how Edward and the beta team help me keep the app stable for live shows.
And finally we get personal: parenting, homeschooling our autistic kiddo, splitting parenting days 50:50 with my wife, the impact on productivity, living like a hermit in a cabin while the app spreads worldwide, playing Irish music on the concertina, and why I still answer emails and get involved on the forums myself. It’s a long, open conversation about how Loopy Pro came to be and what it’s like being a one-man dev shop.
Comments
Congratulations to Mike for all the hard work he does! You are a great part and a major player on what makes iOS audio app community possible and interesting. It was nice to know the amount of pitfalls he encountered throughout the years to make iOS audio apps possible.
As a developer myself, I think it was a good eye opener for Inby to see that doing app development is hard and even a simple added feature to an app may take months of work. And not being able to control the whole underneath software stack make things even harder. That story of Google deprecating an API and Apple changing things every iOS release are so frustrating and just amplify my appreciation for Mike and others and all the work they did to basically create the audio app ecosystem on iOS with Audiobus. And just reinforce my opinion that what makes iOS app music scene great are the amazing developers releasing audio apps for it, despite everything Apple do to make it difficult.
I didn’t know the importance/role of Edward. This is a great listen and gives me a massive amount of perspective and appreciation. Thank you.
Michael, you have inspired so many artists, developers, entrepreneurs, communities. Literally every iOS AU dev has cited your influence and or success in my personal conversations, whether it be your unique pricing model, tech integration, or ability to cultivate a loyal community/ user base- you are very special brother. You deserve the recognition and the love.
Absolutely! I don't often watch any iOS-related YouTube content, but this is definitely on my watch list. Thank you so much for all you've done and continue to do for this scene Michael!
Kudos to:
I often start an audio podcast or YouTube video to get to sleep and with this one I ended up listening to all 2:33 minutes straight until long after midnight.
Thank you so much, everyone, that’s very kind of you
@Michael is who I want to be when I grow up.
😄
You're an inspiring dude for sure Michael, and on multiple levels with your commitment to family and community too. And also big big thanks to Edward for his ceaseless, patient elucidation of the sacred mysteries of Loopy pro.
❤️
so cool to see where this all started.
Real fun to hear the backstory and then some. By the way, the Kimmel video is still active and still fun to watch. It was my intro to iOS music making.
Awesome stuff, I'll definitely be watching this!
I've just spent the 2h33 watching the video and I thought I would/could never get to the end… :-D… I was wrong ! What a great moment shared !
Like Inby say in the interview, knowing you @Mickaël a little more _(or just a litlle, because I didn't know anything in fact… :-D)… makes me also love Loopy Pro SO much more ! It's not "just an app", coding seems to be a sort of mission, a strength, and a destiny left above your cradle at birth! An extraordinary intelligence that is impressive to see carried by such a simple and endearing man! A thousand congratulations!
What you say about AI is brillant, a little bit scary but so interesting.
❤️ Wow, thank you!
A beautiful human being
> > Real fun to hear the backstory and then some. By the way, the Kimmel video is still active and still fun to watch. It was my intro to iOS music making.
Ha! I can't believe I wrote Kimmel, I know the difference between them well enough.
This is super rad!
And, in case y'all didn't get enough Michael, here's a "vintage" interview
Somehow, @Michael looks younger now. And, I'm a hundred years older 😂
I remember all of those milestones, including the Welsh stint but it was good to get more detail.
It’s amazing how little we had in those days and got excited about each and every step and how much we have now.
AB1 kinda pretty much turned into the monster of Loopy Pro and Impaktor into the monster of Drambo. Both are still literally everything I ever use for iOS jamming.
Cheers @Michael!
❤️