Mission:

We live in a society where people don't have time anymore. Everybody always has something to do, people to text, pictures to take... always busy. Nowadays, people want to spend less time for better results. The current tools on the market for making music are very powerful, packed with lots of features, sometimes at the expense of ease of use or immediacy.

When I designed Looptunes, I wanted to make a product that is so easy to use, that users can get instant gratification fast. Need a drumbeat? Don't want to record kick and a snare, hi-hat or other shakers, quantize them, edit them, fine tune them? Choose a loop you like, take it from there. Loop-based music also doesn't require any musical background (although it helps) which allows everybody, regardless of their musical skills, be creative.

A lot of software packages offer loop content, but either have inefficient browsing (loops in a convoluted directory tree), or the content is limited to a certain number of loops, or the loop download options aren't flexible. With Looptunes, you can choose from a vast loop library containing tens of thousands of loops that is ever growing. You don't have to purchase an entire loop package. Instead, you can pick single loops you like.

Inspiration for Looptunes also came from watching DJs. Some DJs do classic 2-turntable vinyl mixing, some do digital mixing, where they choose elements or loops from different songs and mix them together, and some DJs also add more devices like drum machines or effects processors. But, most of them are creating an organic flow of danceable music. Electronic music is mostly loop-based so I wanted to create a tool that enables you to efficiently create loop-based music from scratch, have a lot of happy accidents and have fun, as music making should be.

Looptunes' layout is inspired by traditional mixing deck layouts with two sides, one "song" per side, and a cross fader that lets you blend between them. Instead of loading a finished song and playing it from start to finish, you can either create your own songs from scratch by throwing loops of different music elements together (drum, bass, synth, vocals). Or you can load pre-created sessions, mix it's individual parts and start/stop different elements with limitless possibilities. And it doesn't stop there... users can synchronize Looptunes with other apps via Ableton link to add drum machines or other sound generators or effects. DJs can synchronize other software to Looptunes and augment their songs with loops and have an entirely new way of mixing and remixing.

Another thing I wanted to accomplish when designing Looptunes was to be able to load songs/sessions without interrupting playback. Most DAWs or performance-oriented tools are single session based, forcing you to stop your current session when loading a new one. Looptunes - being dual session based - lets you load a session on one side while you are still playing another session on the other side.

About the developer:

Peter Thom, the creator of the Looptunes app, is a software developer with over 20 years of experience with audio, video, and multimedia programming. He has always been fascinated by combining music and computers. He got his first computer in 1984 and started programming on it. He got his first synthesizer in 1985 and started home recording not long after.

In 1996, he was on the team that developed one of the first online games in Germany and also composed the game soundtrack for it.

Aside from doing several audio programming gigs for companies including Euphonix, Pinnacle Systems, and Presonus, he also worked on his own pet project in the late 2000's, a software drum machine. He sold it to Akai Professional in 2010 and it became the code base for the MPC software that launched in 2012. He worked for Akai until 2015 and then decided to pursue his own dreams again. Eventually, he came up with the concept for Looptunes because he wanted a performance-oriented tool that inspires and creates music fast.