L7 is what the Loop Station would be like as an iOS app, not hardware – and now it’s just $4

For years, musicians have asked for software to do what the BOSS RC-505 Loop Sta­tion does, and make looping easy. The Audiokit L7 does just that.

Okay, before this sounds like it’s an emulation of the RC-505 with some fake pedals and knobs and such, don’t worry – they didn’t do that. Coming from the makers of iOS sound framework Audiokit, the L7 has the sort of simple, standard visual interface you’d expect from an app, not hardware. So you get high-contrast visuals and waveforms and all that.

But they did adopt the RC-505 looping workflow, combining it with the convenience of touchscreen, visual interface, and – so long as you’ve got an iPad or iPhone handy, always-available mobility. (Heck, since this makes sense as a dedicated device, it might even be worth picking up a cheap iPod touch so your phone doesn’t do double duty.)

So you layer loops successfully as you play – the magical Loop Station formula. The difference is, now you can also layer effects easily on top of that, without losing track of what you’re doing (since there’s more visual feedback on both audio layers and effects).

And yes, if that seems like a missed opportunity for Roland/BOSS – it is. (There’s still time. They have to call this L7, not Loop Station, so Roland still has an opportunity – plus Audiokit don’t support popular Android phones.)

Meanwhile, Audiokit are a model for other developers. You buy the app once – no ads, no subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no nonsense. US$19.99 is the regular price, which seems reasonable – major caveat, I haven’t tested it fully yet. But they’ve got an intro price on for US$3.99, which basically means you shouldn’t wait for my review. (That’s the point where I start to just pay four bucks to save the trouble of waiting for a promo code.)

And wow, the features definitely show they’re listening. I can’t wait to give this a spin on the iPad.

+ Record up to 16 tracks
+ 8 ef­fects per track + mas­ter ef­fects & in­put ef­fects
+ Pan
+ Re­verb
+ Tremo­lo
+ Tem­po de­lay
+ Pitch shift (± 12 semi­tones)
+ Comb fil­ter
+ High pass fil­ter
+ Low pass fil­ter
+ “Voice ­tune” (inspired by Auto-tune) with 144 dif­fer­ent scales, con­trol amount & speed
+ Au­to­mat­i­cal­ly trig­ger ef­fect changes hands-free
+ Vari­able loop length with auto-stop
+ Mute / un­mute in­di­vid­ual sec­tions of a track
+ Over­dub tracks
+ Save ses­sions and ex­port wave files and mixdowns to use in your fa­vorite DAW
+ Im­port au­dio from any file for­mat (wav, mp3, aiff, m4a, etc.)
+ Au­diobus com­pat­i­ble
+ Sync with oth­er apps us­ing Able­ton Link
+ Works with most USB au­dio in­ter­faces
+ Best with wired head­phones

Hardware is still desirable in a lot of situations, but I bet a lot of people will just do both.

US$3.99 on the App Store, starting now. Check out this app, their other work, and their stuff for developers, on their site:

https://audiokitpro.com

Here is, I hope, a great looping performance (I am embedding this from 40,000 feet on Japan Airlines, so you’ll find out probably before I do what happened):

What do you think? Got a looping app (or hardware) you prefer, and want to hold it up against this? Let us know in comments.