Electronic music production has exploded over the past several years. More than ever before, non-instrumentalists are getting into music-making using just their laptops, DAW, and a selection of royalty-free samples. Loopcloud is a provider of over 4 million loops and one-shots, leading the charge for modern music production.
What is Loopcloud 6.0?
Loopcloud is a DAW-integrated sample subscription service. It lets you audition, chop up, and tweak over 4 million loops and one-shots, all of which are 100% royalty-free. That means you can use them however you’d like without risk of owing a copyright owner money!
For many years, the service was partially free. There was the ability to download the app which came with a free sample pack to get you started, and then you could purchase more samples as you’d like. Today they’ve gone the subscription route, which is now the standard model for these types of services.
Monthly plans start at just $7.99. At the lowest tier, you’re given 100 points per month to spend on sounds, presets, or plugins; a 1GB ‘welcome pack’ of samples, as well as presets for Loopcloud Drum and Loopcloud Play; 5GB of cloud storage; and 10 free samples every day. For the average producer, this is more than enough punch to keep your creativity flowing and your music fresh.
Features
- Cloud storage: As the name suggests, you can keep your entire sample collection in the cloud, provided the plan you’ve chosen has enough storage for you. This is excellent for keeping your hard drive clean.
- Loopcloud Drum & Loopcloud Play: Two different instruments built into the software that allow you to play samples like virtual instruments.
- Seamless DAW integration: 8 tracks, effects, tuning, and chopping, all within the app that syncs to the key and tempo of your DAW project. When you make a loop you’re happy with, you can then drag a stereo mixdown or the individual tracks right into your DAW.
- AI Search Technology: The latest addition as of 6.0. AI assigns all samples a tag, and whenever you select one you like, Loopcloud will search both your library as well as the entire Loopcloud library for similar sounding samples. You’ll spend less time searching, because the AI will automatically identify sounds that work together for you to choose from.
As part of the brand new AI functionality in version 6.0, you can further refine your search using Filters: set custom parameters for Tone, Length, Stereo, BPM, Swing, Rhythmic Density, Attack, and Decay to find the perfect sample. Once you’ve found that first sample, that’s when the sound-matching algorithm will kick in to find a whole bunch of different matches. Obviously this isn’t a replacement for human touch, but it’s a time-saving tool to keep you engaged creatively versus spending an hour trying to find the right sound.
Loopcloud vs. Splice
Splice is perhaps the best known sample service out there right now. For good reason, too: it’s affordable, the selection is great, the desktop app is nicely designed, you can put plugins on a rent-to-own plan, and more. It even has a couple of built-in programs, called Beatmaker and Astra, to compete with Loopcloud’s Drum and Play plugins.
They’re very similar at face value. Even their entry-level plans are the same price and offer the same number of credits to spend on samples (100). One of the major differences is that Loopcloud offers free sample daily, while Splice’s freebies are more sporadic. It also has the best DAW integration out of any sample service, and the ability to extensively edit samples in the software before even dragging them into your DAW is impressive.
Both services are quite powerful, but you’ll get more in-depth and creative with Loopcloud thanks to its 8-track editor complete with effects and everything you need to flip a sample before it even hits the DAW.
Conclusion
With lots of competition these days, Loopcloud is staying one step ahead. More than just a sample library, this software is actually like a mini DAW itself. Choose a sound, let the AI suggest complementary sounds, and then chop, flip, and edit away to create the perfect loop or drum pattern—all before you leave the Loopcloud app!