Loop: A simple music application

danigm — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100

In the last year I've seen some really good musician that performs all the instruments in a song with just a loop machine, recording each instrument one by one in tracks and looping.

I was thinking that it should be easy to have a desktop application that does exactly the same, just some tracks to record some sounds and the playback with a loop option, and that's what I created during this week.

The Loop application is just a simple Gtk4 application that uses gstreamer to record tracks and then you can play each one at the same with or without loop option. With that, a good musician could create the base melody of the song and then sign on top of that. Unfortunately, I'm not a good musician, but I can use this to play around.

I've just created the request on flathub to add the application, so if everything is okay it will be available there soon, so more people can play with this awesome toy.

Right now it has the basic record, play and loop functionality with just four tracks, so don't expect to have a professional music app (yet). The recording and play times are not perfect and there's a delay, that's a known issue, but I'm planning to fix this issue and add more functionality in the future, like:

Make number of tracks configurable
Import track from files
Add a trim slider per track, to be able to adjust the recorder track to loop
Metronome tick and clock to have a visual reference for recording tracks
A record button, but export the combination of all tracks and mic to a mp3 file

And that's all. The logo and design is an initial version done by myself, so if any designer wants to take a look, all contributions are welcome. And of course any code contribution is also welcome.

If you use this application and do some good or fun performance, please, ping me on social networks and let me know.

danigm.net - loop

Loop: A simple music application