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Why Logic Pro for iPad so buggy?
I constantly encounter problems that I have never encountered in my entire history of working with AUM, Nanostudio or others. Cubasis is certainly not a gift either, but I don't remember such blatant glitches in it.
Today, another problem, I try to add a new channel to sum channel to create a drum kit via pattern, in the end it starts to play samples that do not exist at all (there are no samples in the channels), while the previous channels from the pattern just disappear from the pattern. You can't add these channels to kit pieces at all, as if they don't exist at all.
In half a year of Logic Pro for iPad existence, they rolled out the only update that solves the problem with the sampler, while they just ignore the rest of the problems. I've written three times to the feedback form with various problems that arise in the process, they don't even respond to
them at all.
Comments
For what it is worth, I got a response asking for a project file that demonstrated a bug. If you don’t hear from them, it probably means they’re already aware of the issue.
I crashed my iPad with my Logic project. All of a sudden a flash and the Apple logo was on the screen. It had been saved though, so I can’t fault them on that. I used to crash GarageBand all the time on my iPhone
There are a lot of bugs. There are also a lot of misunderstandings.
Some of logics features aren’t very logical at all and result in people using them incorrectly and thinking they’ve found bugs.
Drum machine designer is a bit of a kludge and lots of people are using it wrong. Which is apple’s fault not theirs. Logic is a big cumbersome complex app and some features are bolted on in a way that makes it easy to tie yourself in knots if you don’t understand why it’s made the way it is.
In your example above @soundsgoodbro you would be better off using a drum machine designer to do What you’re trying to achieve as that automatically limits the note ranges each part plays on.
Otherwise when you add an instrument to the stack it will be played by all the midi in the parent row. If you add it manually you should go into the track inspector and change the parameters for note range so it only responds to the note you want your kick playing on.
All drum machine designer really is is a UI to build track stacks. When you add a kick instrument to a pad in drum machine designer it actually adds an instrument channel to the stack, as you have tried to do manually, and sets its note range to a single key. Each pad has different note ranges so as to automatically prevent overlaps.
It can all fall apart quickly when you mess with the instruments inside the stack though.
In this case I don’t think it’s a bug but a feature that is implemented in a way that can be confusing. Again, that’s apple’s fault not ours.
once you get your head around how it works it should make sense.
Logic, like all DAWS, is very opinionated. If you come at it and try and do things the way you’ve always done it or the way you feel is right, you’ll lose .
Logic is a great app but not very forgiving, especially when one assumes a feature should work a specific way that for reasons (usually due to the fact Logic is a 30 year old app) they often don’t work that way.
TLDR. If you want to manually add an instrument to a track stack to play a specific drum part in a pattern editor, set the instruments note range in the track inspector to limit it to just the key that the specific drum plays on in the pattern editor row. Otherwise it will respond to other rows in the pattern editor as the top lane plays all the instruments below.
The only solution I found is to click on the piano icon on drum designer and add drag-n-drop samples to it, then it works. In case of adding channels to the group manually, the logic starts to get weird, you can try it yourself, it starts to play sounds that don't exist and so on.
“ Some of logics features aren’t very logical” so that true. Very strange approach to the whole vorkflow and not logical, especially when there is already a certain habit and logic, which is obvious and understandable. Okay there are frequent crashes, it will probably be fixed or loss of third-party samples in alchemy sampler etc, but logic like this apparently can not be fixed by anything.
What I call German logic after years working with a German supplier “You must operate like this…”
No I don't think it actually does.
When you put a pattern on the top level of a summing stack it plays every single instrument in the stack below. All Drum Machine Designer is, is a UI wrapped around a standard summing stack.
What it does is automatically set note limits for each instrument to stop every track in the stack playing back notes from the pattern in the top row.
We can set up our own summing stack drum machine without using drum machine designer like this:
I've made a summing stack with two instruments inside it. Inst 2 is Ruismaker, Inst 3 is Ruismaker FM.
I want the kick from RM and the Snare from RM FM.
So I set it up Inst 2 (Ruismaker) like this:
and I set up Inst 3 (Ruismaker FM) like this:
Now every time I hit C#2 I get a kick and D#2 I get a snare.
But say I add a third instrument as a hi hat, so I add a row in the pattern editor and add Logic's hi hat synth as the tracks instrument. Now every time I hit the kick I get the Ruismaker Kick AND the new Hi Hat playing at the same time if I haven't yet set the note range of the hi hat to reposing to just the pad/note the pattern editor row is set to.
I think when you say you're getting notes that aren't there, that's what's happening. You're expecting that when you add a row for the hi hat, it will only respond to notes you programme into that row. But unless you also limit the note range in the inspector for the hi hat instrument, it will play every note/drum hit from the pattern in the top row of the stack. So in our example above, every time the kick and snare hit, the hi hat will also sound. Limiting the note range to just the note/pad we want for the hi hat fixes this.
The kick and snare don't sound when you play the hi hat pad as I already set the note limits.
Drum machine designer is a wrapper to track stacks that makes it easier to do the above as it automatically sets the key ranges and lets you drag samples onto pads as well (in which case it makes a new track with a quicksampler instrument and sets the note range to only respond to the selected pad/key).
Once you understand the 'Logic' way, it does actually makes sense and you can see why they made the choices they made when you think it through.
Another example of track stacks. I could make a stack that contains two instruments, a Synth Bass and a Pad. I want the bass to play up to B2 and from C3 onwards I want the pad.
So I add a MIDI track and add a synth plugin and choose a bass preset. I set the note limit in the inspector so it only plays up to B2.
I then add a new MIDI track and add a synth with a pad preset and set the lower key range to C3.
I select the two new tracks and create a summing track.
Now if I select the Sum track and play the keyboard I'll get a synth bass with my left hand and a pad with my right hand and can murder "West End Girls".
If I didn't set the note limits, every key would play both sounds at the same time when the SUM track is selected. The same applies if you made rows in the pattern editor to play drum hits.
TLDR. Set key limits for every track in the track stack to stop Logic playing "notes that aren't there".
I went to finally try this out and Wow… apparently logic isn’t even compatible with my iPad Pro 2nd gen so I cannot even download it
Oh well!!
For me, the worst offender as far as bugs go is the undo/redo functionality. So much so that while recently rebuilding a mix from the ground up, I duplicated my track using the name “don’t trust logic”.
Sometimes it “undoes” something I tweaked a few minutes prior (rather than what I just immediately did) . Sometimes, it just plain forgets. You undo a parameter change and it does an undo on a recoding of a brilliant take. Worse, redo, also often forgets following an undo, losing that brilliant take. It’s all so unpredictable.
I absolutely l love the workflow, it really clicks with me, the ui is a joy and the piano roll (largely, ignoring velocity) is excellent and tracks my fingers as expected (compared to cubasis). Likewise, having a pattern layout instead of piano roll has transformed my relationship with drum programming.
However, some bugs are almost show stoppers, I am reminded of the similar same love / hate relationship I had with cubasis 3 in the early days.
While I’m hopeful they’ll fix these bugs, it’s been so long now that my initial hopes of Apple adding features (like more control of alchemy - not being able to modify the arpeggiator, for example makes a lot of patches useless) are diminishing, instead I’m in the slightly sad position where I’m only looking forward to the worst of the worst bug fixes.
Despite this, I’m still enjoying Logic in these early days.