Loopy Support

I bought Loopy for my iPod Touch 3rd Gen yesterday - great app, awesome interface, does what my Boss Loopstation does, but is completely portable and £175 cheaper!

As pointed out, it's not completely stable in terms of mic input/sound output.  I'm noticing:

* Loopy refuses to work if it can't detect a mic.  I understand why, although it'd be great to be able to get loops recorded in a session, unplug the mic, and play the loops through an amp for a bit of live performance.

* Metallic sounding recording on occasion.  I've noticed it's when you have a lot of noise going in on each loop.  Record in a quiet location it's generally not a problem.   When there's more noise going into the mic, it's a bit unstable.

* Playback has, on one or two occasions, become raspy after using for a while.

The only way to cure the problems above is to exit the app, unplug and plug in the mic, and restart.  A bit of a pain...

Question is, can these be sorted, or do we wait for Loopy 2 - and is this still due for release? 

£5.99 is an amazing price for this if it works, but point of principle would suggest it's a bit off to pay anything if it doesn't work satisfactorily most of the time...

Hi JC,

Thanks for the message, and for using Loopy!  Sorry to hear about the iPod issues - it appears OS 3.0 did introduce a couple of mic-based oddities that have brought some issues with Talkie and the iPod, too.

Point 2 is a tricky one - the mic on the iPhone (and I suppose the headset for the iPod) really isn't designed for studio- or performance-grade recording.  I'm going to add a gate feature soon, and will do what I can with noise reduction, but that's not really a solution for particularly noisy environments: The only genuine solution there is better hardware.  I'm not entirely sure what's currently on the market - a Google search will probably turn up some possibilities.

Point 3 sounds like it'll need a bit of serious debugging - it sounds like there may be an audio system bug, but a workaround may be possible. It may have to wait till Loopy 2, though, I'm afraid.  Which I'm working on now, and if you're interesting in beta testing when it's ready, I'd love the assistance - PM me and I'll keep you updated.

If you'd like, I can probably work in a fix for number 1 though, and get you an ad hoc distributed update.  I won't release a fix through the app store just yet, unless more people report it as in issue.  Again, PM me - with your iPod's UDID (select iPod in iTunes, click the 'Serial Number' label, hit cmd-C or ctrl-C on a PC to copy to clipboard) if that would help.

Cheers,
Michael