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.
AudioLayer vs Obsidian stability
I was wondering what your experience is of AudioLayer and Obsidian in terms of stability handling samples, specifically?
I’ve written about issues with AL before on my iPhone 7 Plus. I recently got an iPhone XR and get kind of the same experience: occasionally crackles and pops when I play a sample library extensively. I must say I do believe the performance is a bit better though. These are not large libraries, but they are doing random round robin and I edit the patches all in AL ground up. Pure waveforms, that is.
For you that have tried these things, do you think NanoStudio’s Obsidian is more reliable? I’m about to buy an iPad Pro since I want to be able to work with laptop grade performance, but I’m not sure if it will make that much of a difference if the software can’t handle it.
Comments
My largest AL lib is about 1.4GB, using multiple layers each with the default maximum of velocity zones available during import and different samples on every key.
Runs well on an iPhone 5SE and on an iPad 6.
I remember people repeatedly mentioning the XR and some iPad "Pro" models giving crackles but I own neither of these iDevices.
Obsidian is very reliable but cannot replace AL, just like AL cannot replace Obsidian.
All VIRSYN apps are amazing!
Auto BUY
IPhone 5s or SE?
SE.
Did you read my entry? I use AL all the time. Hence the question.
In some instances I’ve noticed how those crackles emerge when the AL level is too high. It’s also important to both use the unit for music mainly and have enough storage left.
I think you and I have talked about these things before. Didn’t you have a large piano library? However, I do believe there is an issue with the algorithm handling random round robin and maybe even regular rr. With a piano there’s no randomness unless you set it up that way?
Obsidian doesn't do round robin, so you won't be able to do exactly the same thing.
Saying that, I'm completely in love with Obsidian, which is rock solid, resource-light and wildly flexible. If you're editing your patches from the ground up, I'm sure you'll find a lot to love. There are many thoughtful touches to its design.
Besides no round robin, be aware that it can't do more than 3 velocity layers per patch, or more than 24 samples per layer, and obviously it's stuck inside of NS2, so you need to figure out if that's the right environment for you. I'm more into old-school sampling than importing Kontakt libraries, so I'm fine with the limitations, but some people are just looking to make their desktop libraries portable and that's cool. AudioLayer seems to be the best option for that kind of thing right now.
As others have said, I don't think they're really equivalent, Audiolayer is better for creating sampled instruments like pianos etc because it supports more features (round robin, more sample zones, more velocity layers etc).
However Obsidian is really great as a sampling synth, and I think for that it's pretty much unparalleled on iOS. You can use long samples as oscillators and mangle them in beautiful ways to create really cool Alchemy-like sounds.
What do you mean by "for music mainly"?
Yes!
Exactly. There is no round robin and actually I don't miss it because it has enough velocity layers to trigger different samples all the time anyway. I'm also not a friend of blowing up the library to twice the size or more to achieve a basically negligible effect.
Same applies to acoustic drums: I prefer to have more velocity layers over using round robin because that just sounds better to my ears.
With Obsidian that's more difficult because 3 V-layers don't give you much choice but on the other hand, Obsidian supports an undocumented RR Wave format that makes it support round robin. Obsidian and AL, as different as they are, complement each other quite well!
Well, when you sample analog synths with not velocity sensitivity round robin is what you use So it’s of course crucial to making them sound good. And even if the synth sampled supports velocity sensitivity that usually is used to manipulate things like the cutoff and that’s not always wanted. I want randomness on the same velocity level. When you make electronic music that’s obviously important.
You can do that but you'll only capture as many variations of their analog nature as you have round robin samples. I would personally prefer to use the rather good synthesis features in Obsidian to emulate these in a seamless way, but whatever makes your sound great must be great 😉👍🏼
I have worked with emulations since the 90s. When done right analog samples sound way better. Just compare Arturia’s Jupiter-8 emulation to the sampling done by JupiterByJay. With 5-7 layers of rr, and maybe even fewer with random rr, the latter wins every time.
When it comes to creativity and workflow it’s a totally different thing. And you can’t very easily simulate pwm for instance with sampling, such as is possible with emulations. There are sampling synths that do this but I haven’t seen it in a softsampler on a computer. Emulations such as TAL-UNO are great. I’m not a purist by principal. But sound wise you come way closer to the real sound of analogs with sampling and random rr than anything I’ve ever come across anyway.
So this is why I persist on getting this to work. 🙂
@joachim_s Thanks for pointing me at JupiterByJay!
Didn't know this one yet.
True, I have seen a lot more bad software emulations than bad sampled Kontakt libraries.
I would preferably use the Roland Cloud Jupiter-8 over the Arturia version though.
Good luck with finding a proper RR solution!
Haven’t tried the Roland soft sweet.
Thanks! 🙂
More details about the samples would be useful... especially sizes and their number.
I think we can all push our devices to crackle and even crash AUv3's. AudioLayer will
accept and play back a lot of data but we can break it with a lot of MIDI events.
But for your planning: AudioLayer is a workhouse that let's you go past the wall of safe
audio.
Obsidian is several restricted and would rarely produce audio artifacts by imposing these limits but I have never pushed Nanostudio2 that hard.
I've pushed AudioLayer with sample folders that can make it crash just loading them: 100 samples of 10 seconds each for example.
I have come to realize that using 10 layers is only critical for perfect acoustic recreations and it's better to buy those from UVI or Crudebytes or in Pure Synth. They do the testing and find that balance point between efficiency and audio quality.
I also suspect when you do with sampling is not anything like my rompler quest.
Obsidian is really good and there are many sampled instruments available on PatchStorage that are done by many forum sampling gurus. It's definitely a tool worth
owning and learning... especially for scaling many sampled instances. It's the king there.
The sampler inside Auria Pro (Lyra) is rock solid and can load SF2, SFZ. I wish it was released as an AUv3 packaged App but they are very dedicated to maintaining that code.
I hope they can find the revenue to sustain their business.