Mini Reviews
Web www.loopmasters.com Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX
Loopmasters’ librarian/storefront application enables previewing and direct purchase of individual sounds and full packs from the company’s entire catalogue. It also has a rapidly growing number of their distributed third parties, as well as browsing, searching, auditioning and downloading of all your local and cloud-hosted Loopmasters samples, with comprehensive tagging (including key and tempo) and filtering. At the time of writing, an update that promised to add the ability to import non-Loopmasters content was imminent, but we’ve not seen it in action.
Currently described as being in beta, the Store is fully searchable, and previews are watermarked with very quiet birdsong to thwart piracy – quite an effective and sufficiently unobtrusive solution. Samples are bought and added to your Loopmasters account using a points system, and you get 500 points for signing up (a fiver’s worth), not to mention over a gigabyte of free samples and access to 150 more every week.
The samples in your ur account and on your hard drive are accessed via a an attractive, intuitive browser, rowser, with those in the cloud d streamed in compressed sed format for previewing, g, then downloaded at full quality. uality.
You can drag samples ples and MIDI files directly out of the app into your DAW, or r use the Loopcloud plugin n to feed the app’s output to a DAW mixer channel, for auditioning samples (but not MIDI files) within projects. ects. Communication between ween app and plugin is bidirectional, rectional, so playback timestretches automatically atically to follow host tempo, and the ingenious ious Pattern menu offers a wide range of rhythmic mic auto-triggering options for one-shots: on the beat, eighth-notes, on the backbeat, etc. Samples es can be transposed and set to auto-match the e project key, too.
The obvious omission, sion, currently, is MIDI file playback, which will presumably be added at some point using a demonstrative ROMplerstyle soundbank or synth of some sort. As it stands, though, Loopcloud is a fine piece of work. Discretely concealing its marketing/sales activity behind a layer of genuinely useful functionality, it makes accessing and deploying Loopmasters’ increasingly vast archive of samples easy.
n8/ 10n