@Timo thanks a lot for your thoughts and for your very nice feedback, as well as for posting your live session on Instagram - sounds very good! Quick answers between the lines:
1-3. Thanks!
4: Right, the gate input is mainly for triggering footswitch commands (like tap tempo) from the modular system
5: Good point! I’m not using it much with a DAW as a tempo master - in general LoopA (as well as SEQ v4+) should be aware of remote MIDI CLOCK starts and should tempo-sync to the source. As you wrote, it might take a while to get “in sync” - if there are artifacts right at the start, you might be able to compensate by starting with a (short) empty scene, until the timing has settled? But my recommendation would be to use LoopA as a timing master and sync your DAW to it - it’s clock is very stable (MIOS32), and if you drive a lot of other hardware gear in form of eurorack and MIDI synths from it, clocking it from LoopA as a master should be good.
6: Yes, that is intentional, as notes are recorded unquantized, they will need to be “converted” to a “step” before swing can be applied on that step - if there’s a swing algorithm that can work on unquantized time signatures, please tell me, i can look into it.
7: yes 🙂
8: MatriX allows this - sorry! 🙂 - same UI/UX notes as for 13. apply - a multi-note editor would obfuscate the small UI on LoopA - thus we went for a single note editor here - with the full feature set available on the big hardware. The good thing about MatriX is, that you can set it up in your studio, program your tracks, then take the small LoopA only to the live session.
9: good idea, i’ve added this to the LoopA feature request list, it should be possible to indicate in the scene-map view, if a clip is in use.
10: go for the big one, it’s worth it, also the DIY experience of it is unique.
11: Yes, 6 tracks is limited, but LoopA is intentionally limited: if LoopA supported instrument-switching per scene (technically not impossible), then it would get a lot more complex in the UI - some users might switch a scene and then total chaos breaks out, as an unexpected instrument starts playing. Also in any DAW you see one track per instrument, this allows variations with having multiple scenes of the same instrument. If more than 6 tracks are required, you could chain 2x LoopA and one MatriX, we have at least one power user doing that 🙂.
12: good!
13: yes, the notes are limited per clip - on the other hand, the display is limited as well, putting many more on screen would result in a pixel chaos 🙂. In general, we tried to strike a good balance between quick usability and user-friendliness (i.e. no menu-diving per page, no obfuscated screens, thus we also do not support multiple CCs per track) and a feature-set that we think is sufficient for 95% of MIDI-looper use-cases - 5% of power-users might need a bigger solution, but the vast majority should be very happy.
14: there are many different users with different preferences - for me personally the timing information on the mutes screen is the most important information ever - to be able to “unmute” any track in time, before the “wrap-around” - as there are only 6 tracks, one should quickly learn to which instruments these are mapped.
LoopA v2 is what it has grown into - about 10 software revisions since the start 2015 and v2.11 is in the making and scheduled for this year - we’ll continue to improve the product, but we’re very careful to not break a good concept with feature software bloat, which would make it unusable for every user.
Best regards and enjoy!
Peter