Create Your Own Mixes & Variations Of Music Loops With LoopJam

LoopJam is an open source application targeted at audiophiles for creating music loops in a variety of ways. The application lets you load or generate music loops by rearranging their waveforms from existing music files to create a new variation. Samples of music loops can be easily grabbed from sites like SoundCloud and similar places that provide royalty-free music, and LoopJam also packs in a few sample loop files out of the box to get you acquainted with how the program actually works. It’s fairly intuitive and fun to use once you get past the initial learning curve. Lets take a closer look at it after the break.

Although, the interface of LoopJam is unlikely to drop your jaws, it serves the purpose of the app well. You’re presented with a black themed UI divided in different sections that define its functionality. To insert a new audio file, click the Load button and select your sound clip. The application accepts files in WAV format only, so if you’ve got yours in MP3, you might want to convert them to WAV first. There are also a few pre-included audio loops that you can try to see how LoopJam really works.

You might need to tinker around with the provided options for getting the hang of the app’s usage. Though let me break down a few things to make it a tad bit easier. Once a loop is loaded, it’s sliced into a total of 16 segments, allowing you to rearrange these slices to create your own variation. Each waveform can be positioned to a user-selected location, or even disabled entirely. The application allows you to make up to 10 different variations (called Scenes) of a track and switch between them on the fly via the the numeric hotkeys 0-9. For further details regarding how to use the hotkeys, you can refer to the included Read Me file.

Apart from that, you can switch the app’s mode between Fx and Slice. Fx are basically the different sound effects that control different notes in a loop, for instance reverser, bitcrush, pump, stutter, halfspeed, lowpass and so on. Likewise, the app also allows controlling the level of each FX using the color-coded bars at the bottom-right. You can save your current session as well, which in turn allows you to continue right from where you previously left. The export button lets you save the loop as a WAV file.

Although it might not be the most easy-to-use application around, LoopJam’s innovative and interesting features make it worth a try. It’s an open-source app that works on Windows and Mac OS X.

Download LoopJam