A loop station that plays itself.
Record and overdub on five tracks the way you would on a hardware looper. Then draw those same commands on a timeline, and the song presses its own buttons while you play. One engine underneath both, so nothing you learn at the loop station stops being true in the arrangement.
Apple Silicon · macOS 13.3+
When ALK2 went away, so did the idea.
zenAud.io's ALK2 was discontinued, and the thing it did — an arrangement that performs a looper — went with it. Everything else asks you to choose: the immediacy of a loop pedal, or the structure of a timeline.
LOOM aims at that gap without giving up the hardware-looper flow to get there. Press the ring and it records — there is no arm step, and there never will be. Draw the same command on a lane and it fires on its own tick, to the sample.
Draw the performance. Play over it.
Regions on a track's lane, three verbs: REC, DUB, PLAY. A gap means the track is stopped, so you never draw a stop — LOOM synthesises it at the region's end. This is the half a hardware looper cannot do.
It tells you before it plays.
If any region in the arrangement cannot be played correctly, nothing starts. The notice row says why — one line per bad region, each a full sentence that leads with what to change rather than an error code.
The alternative most software picks is to play seven of your eight regions and drop the eighth silently. You find out from the audience.
A real desk behind the loops.
Four banks off one switch — loop tracks, inputs, master, buses. Eight insert slots on every strip, four effects to put in them, and every chain runs in stereo on every placement. Chains save with the song.
The venue's WiFi is not your problem.
LOOM opens no connection, sends no request and reads nothing back. Not on launch, not on a schedule, not to check a licence, not to fetch a font. No account, no activation server, nothing reporting home. Your licence is verified on your own Mac.
A build check enforces it: no code LOOM writes reaches a network entry point, and the check fails the build if any does. Two buttons hand an address to your browser — buying a licence, and looking up the latest version. That is the whole of it.
Built for the twenty minutes you are on stage.
Read this before you buy it.
LOOM refuses to draw a control that is wired to nothing, because on stage that reads as a bug. The application ships a manual page listing what is deliberately absent. Here is the same list. Some of these are decisions; some are simply not built yet, and the difference is marked.
A pedalboard drives the whole instrument.
Every track has its own octave with the same seven commands in the same order, and the global verbs have an octave of their own. The map starts at note 36, so a 49-key controller reaches the first four tracks with nothing transposed. A live monitor on the bottom rail shows the last message received, in every view, so you can answer is LOOM seeing my controller without leaving what you are doing.
The map is compiled in. There is no MIDI learn, no binding editor and no way to reassign a note — that is on the roadmap, not in this version. Notes only: CC is displayed and bound to nothing, and there is no clock, MTC or MMC in or out.
Fourteen days, everything unlocked.
Nothing watermarked, nothing limited inside a session, no account to make. When the trial ends, a licence is a block of text you open once — LOOM checks it on your Mac at launch and never again. A check will never interrupt a running LOOM.