An honest tour of the live-looping landscape — hardware, iPad, Mac, Windows. Written by a musician who’s a fan of everyone in this category.
Hi. I’m the developer of UndoLooper, which is one of the loopers in this guide. I’m also somebody who’s gigged with a Boss RC-505 on a table, a TC Helicon VoiceLive on a mic stand, and an iPad on a music stand at various points over the years. So I’m not coming at this as a marketer telling you why my thing is the best thing. I’m coming at it as somebody who’s spent real money on most of these tools, watched the people who build them push the craft forward, and figured out — sometimes the hard way — which tool actually fits which kind of player.
The honest truth about live loopers in 2026: there is no single best one. There are eight or nine excellent options, and the right answer depends almost entirely on what you play, where you play, and how you want to perform. The goal of this page is to help you skip the trial-and-error and find your tool faster.
If after reading this you decide the right looper for you is one I didn’t build, I’ll consider this page a success. Go play.
A short history (because it actually matters)
Live looping started in the 1970s with Robert Fripp running tape between two Revox reel-to-reel machines on stage — a setup he later called Frippertronics. Brian Eno used the same trick on the (No Pussyfooting) recordings. The idea was beautiful and the gear was a nightmare: two reel-to-reels, a length of magnetic tape stretched between them, and a performer hoping nothing snapped.
Then came rack-mount digital. The Echoplex Digital Pro in the mid-90s gave performers an actual feature set: overdubs, multiply, reverse, undo. The Echoplex is the great-grandfather of nearly every looper in this guide. If you read a looper’s manual today and recognize commands like Multiply or Insert, you’re reading dialect that traces back to that one rack unit.
Then the floor pedals — Boomerang in the late 90s, then Boss’s RC family starting around 2001, then Pigtronix, EHX, TC Helicon. The looper became something a guitarist could put under their foot.
Then the iPad. Michael Tyson built Loopy for iOS around 2010, and a decade later Loopy Pro made tablet-based live looping a legitimate touring rig. Loopy Pro is, no exaggeration, one of the most influential pieces of music software of the last decade.
Then the plugin generation — Audio Damage Enso, Mobius 3, and now a small handful of newer entries (UndoLooper included) that run as standalone apps and as VST3/AUv3 inside a DAW.
Every generation solved a problem the previous one couldn’t. None of them killed the previous one. Right now in 2026, all of these tools are still being made, still being sold, still being used on real stages. That’s the landscape we’re walking through.
What kind of player are you?
Skip ahead to the section that fits.
- You play guitar with both hands occupied and you want a foot-controlled rig → Floor pedals.
- You’re a vocalist or producer building loops at a table, want lots of pads and routing → Tabletop hardware.
- You want an iPad/iPhone-based rig you can throw in a backpack → iPad and iPhone.
- You’re at a Mac or Windows laptop, want a plugin you can run in a DAW or standalone → Plugins for Mac and Windows.
- You already live in Ableton, Logic, or Bitwig and want to know what’s built in → DAW built-in loopers.
- You want to know specifically where UndoLooper fits and where it doesn’t → Where UndoLooper fits.
Floor pedals
The Boss RC family, the Headrush Looperboard, the EHX 95000, the Pigtronix Infinity, and the TC Helicon Ditto family are the workhorses of guitar-based live looping. Tap a switch with your foot, build a loop, tap again to overdub, tap to stop. Sound runs through real I/O. No laptop, no operating system, no software updates the night before a show.
If you’re a working guitarist who plays bar gigs, weddings, or theater pits, this is probably still the right answer in 2026. A pedal under your foot is the most reliable thing in this entire guide. Nothing reboots in the middle of a chorus.
The honest picks:
- Boss RC-500 / RC-600. The 600 is, for many gigging guitarists, the floor looper. Stereo, 99 memory slots, three tracks, MIDI sync, expression pedal input. If your rig is pedalboard-shaped, start here.
- Headrush Looperboard. Bigger budget, more layers, color touchscreen, eight stereo tracks. If you’re doing solo-act sets where you arrange whole songs on stage, this is the platform a lot of touring solo acts use.
- Boss RC-505 MKII (tabletop, not strictly a floor pedal). The gold standard for vocal looping. Reggie Watts territory. Five stereo tracks, dedicated input effects, knobs and faders within hand’s reach. Around $800 new. If you’re a vocalist building loops with your hands, you’ve already heard of it.
- TC Helicon VoiceLive 3 / 3 Extreme. Vocal-focused, harmony engine, looper, effects, all in one floor unit. Genuinely great for singer-guitarists.
Where this category struggles: undo. Most floor loopers give you one undo, maybe two on the higher-end units. Once you’ve built a chorus, you can’t really deconstruct it back into a verse. You’re locked into “build a wall of sound” mode. That’s the gap software loopers — including ours — try to fill.
If you mostly stand on a stage with a guitar around your neck and you want zero laptop in your performance chain, buy a Boss RC-600 or a Headrush Looperboard. Honestly. This guide can stop here for you.
Tabletop hardware
The category, really, is the Boss RC-505 MKII. There are other tabletop loopers (the Pigtronix Infinity 3 lives partly here, the Electro-Harmonix 95000 can sit on a table) but the RC-505 is what people mean when they say “tabletop looper.”
It’s a beat-box-shaped piece of hardware with five stereo loop tracks across the front, dedicated input effects, MIDI, USB audio, and the kind of physical control surface that’s genuinely satisfying to perform with. If you’ve watched Reggie Watts, Marc Rebillet, or pretty much any beatbox-and-vocalist YouTube performer, you’ve probably watched an RC-505.
Who it’s for: vocalists, beatboxers, and producer-performers who build loops with their hands rather than their feet. Players who want the loop tracks visible and tactile in front of them, not abstracted behind a screen.
Honest tradeoffs: $800 is a real commitment. The unit is dense and there’s a learning curve. And, like the floor pedals, undo on the RC-505 is limited — it’s a “build a wall” tool, not a “deconstruct and reconstruct” tool. If you’ve watched an RC-505 set, you’ve noticed that the arc of the song is usually one long crescendo.
If you’re a vocalist or beatboxer with the budget and you want a dedicated tactile box, buy the RC-505 MKII. It’s the right answer for that player.
iPad and iPhone
This is Loopy Pro’s room. We have to start there because Michael Tyson and the team at A Tasty Pixel have spent over a decade building what is, genuinely, one of the most influential and most-loved pieces of music software in the world right now.
Loopy Pro is the iOS flagship. It’s a canvas-based performance environment — you design your own interface out of pads, faders, MIDI controls, and AUv3 plugin hosts, then you perform from the canvas you built. The customization ceiling is extraordinary. Touring artists from Dub FX downward use it on real stages. It costs $29.99 plus an optional $14.99/year for ongoing feature updates, and that’s a fair price for what it does. A Mac version is publicly in development as of this writing.
Who Loopy Pro is for: iPad and iPhone players who want to build a fully customized performance rig and enjoy the building part. Players whose stage setup includes a tablet on a mic stand or a stand-mounted iPhone. Players who want deep MIDI routing and AUv3 plugin hosting inside the looper. Players who want years of community canvases and templates to learn from.
Where Loopy Pro is uncontested: if your rig is iPhone-shaped, nothing else in this guide competes with it. The features, the polish, the ecosystem, the community — Loopy owns this category and deserves to.
Where the conversation gets interesting is for players who feel like the configuration work is between them and the performance. The canvas-builder workflow is incredibly powerful and some players love the building part as much as the playing part. Other players just want to walk on stage and play. If you’ve found yourself bouncing off the configuration depth and wishing there was a simpler tool with similar performance ambition, that’s a real conversation — see Where UndoLooper fits below, or read the focused Loopy Pro and UndoLooper comparison.
Also in this category:
- Loopy HD. The original Loopy, still sold, lower price, simpler. If Loopy Pro feels like too much app, Loopy HD is the older sibling that still gigs just fine.
- Quantiloop. Strong feature set, vocal-friendly, often praised by users coming from hardware backgrounds.
If you’re on iPad and your rig is built around the tablet, try UndoLooper and also try Loopy Pro. Free to try. It’s that simple. If you’re on iPhone, Loopy is the answer.
Plugins for Mac and Windows
This is the room with the most options and the most stylistic range. A few of these are pristine performance loopers; a few are full-on Frippertronics emulators; one is free and beloved despite a rough UI; one is mine.
Audio Damage Enso ($79). Single-track, tape-soul aesthetic, through-zero variable speed, Frippertronics-style overdubbing, ten-minute buffer, sector crossfading. Enso is the looper for the player who wants a character — warm, slightly unstable, deeply musical. Audio Damage has been one of the most consistently great plugin companies in this space for years, and Enso is one of their flagship designs. If you want a looper that contributes its own sonic personality to the performance, this is the one.
Audio Damage Circa. Newer multi-track looper from the same company. Six stereo outs, headphone-soloed layer editing, drag-and-drop layer export to a DAW. If you want Enso’s heart but with multiple synchronized layers, this is where to look.
Mobius 3 (Jeffrey Larson / Circular Labs). Free, open-source-ish, Echoplex Digital Pro–inspired, eight stereo synchronized loopers, full MIDI scripting, deep configuration. Mobius is the hardcore looper’s looper. The UI is dated and the onboarding is rough — it’s currently unsigned on macOS, which means you’ll do the right-click-open dance to install it — but the people who love Mobius really love Mobius. If you want every Echoplex command and a scripting language for custom behavior, this is your tool. It costs nothing. It does almost everything. Just don’t expect it to be pretty.
MSuperLooper (MeldaProduction). Sixteen tracks across four slots — sixty-four loops per instance — with lifetime free updates and a hundred-plus-page manual. MSuperLooper is the “producer’s looper.” If you’re using a looper inside a studio session rather than on a stage, and you want the absolute maximum number of layers and the most granular control, MSuperLooper is the maximalist option.
SooperLooper. Free, open-source, mature, cross-platform. The bare-bones reliable option. Plain-looking but rock solid for years.
Giada. Free, open-source, GPL-licensed, actively developed. More of a “loop machine + scene launcher” than a pure live looper, but for hobbyist setups it’s free and capable.
UndoLooper. I’ll cover this in its own section below so I don’t end up writing my own sales pitch in the middle of a guide. Short version: free, Mac and Windows, standalone + VST3/AUv3, designed around using unlimited undo and redo as performance tools for live verse/chorus arrangement.
If you want character, buy Enso. If you want zero dollars and don’t mind a rough UI, get Mobius. If you want the absolute maximum number of tracks for studio work, look at MSuperLooper. If you want the verse/chorus workflow described below, try UndoLooper.
DAW built-in loopers
Worth a quick mention. If you already own a DAW, you may already have a looper.
- Ableton Live’s Looper device. Reliable, simple, integrates with Ableton’s transport.
- Logic Pro X — Live Loops. Cell-based clip launcher, not a “looper” in the traditional sense, but for grid-based loop performance it’s powerful.
- Bitwig’s looper. Newer, modular-feeling.
These are great for “I’m already in this DAW and I want to record some loops” workflows. They’re typically not the right answer for “I’m going to stand on a stage and perform live with this tool” — that’s what the dedicated loopers in this guide are designed for.
Where UndoLooper fits (and where it doesn’t)
Here’s the honest pitch for my own thing, written with the same standard I’m applying to everyone else in this guide.
UndoLooper is free, runs on iPad, Mac and Windows as a standalone app and as a VST3/AUv3 plugin, and is built around a specific performance philosophy: the undo and redo buttons are the centerpiece of how you arrange songs live.
The idea: build a full chorus — rhythm guitar, percussion, bassline, lead, harmonies. That’s your chorus state. Hit undo, undo, undo until you’re back to an acoustic guitar and a kick. That’s your verse. Perform it. Hit redo, redo, redo, and the whole arrangement slams back in. You just performed a verse-to-chorus song structure live, on stage, with one looper.
That’s the whole design. Two performance shortcuts called Back 5 (peel five layers fast) and Bring It Back (instantly restore your biggest recent state) make this kind of motion fast enough to do mid-song without taking your hands off your instrument.
Who UndoLooper is for: Singers, guitarists, horn players, worship leaders, one-person bands who want to arrange whole songs live on Mac or Windows. Players who prefer “open the app and play” to “spend a weekend configuring a canvas.” Players gigging with older laptops — the audio engine is built from scratch around ASIO and runs smoothly without a $3,000 rig.
Who UndoLooper is NOT for:
- You’re on iPhone. UndoLooperGO is for iPad ONLY. UndoLooper doesn’t ship for iPhone. Loopy Pro is your answer.
- You want to design a custom performance canvas with pads, MIDI grids, and AUv3 plugin hosting. UndoLooper is deliberately not a canvas-builder. Loopy Pro is.
- You want to build the biggest possible studio session with sixteen synchronized tracks. That’s MSuperLooper’s territory.
- You want a unique sonic character baked into the looper itself. UndoLooper is intentionally clean. Enso might be your character pick here.
- You only have one foot pedal. UndoLooper has solid MIDI support but it’s not as deeply foot-controller-mappable as Mobius or a dedicated floor unit. If your only input device is a single switch, using a hardware floor pedal is win for you.
What you get when you download UndoLooper or UndoLooperGO for FREE: The complete live performance engine. Unlimited undo and redo, Back 5, Bring It Back, the standalone app, the VST3/AUv3 plugin. No timer, no nag screens.
What costs money: Three things you get with your purchase and they won’t hurt a live performance without them:
1. Saving .undoloop files (which capture not just your audio but your entire undo/redo timeline as a single shareable file).
2. Echo Stop, a musical fade-out that replaces the harsh cut you get from most loopers when you press stop.
3. Longer base loop length (60 seconds vs the free 30).
If the verse/chorus workflow sounds like the way you want to perform, download UndoLooper free and try it for a week. If it doesn’t click, you’ve still got every other tool in this guide to choose from — and most of them are excellent.
“Best for” — categorical winners
A quick cheat sheet. Multiple winners on purpose, because that’s how this category actually works.
| Category | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Best floor looper for gigging guitarists | Boss RC-600/ Digitech JamMan Delay |
| Best tabletop looper for vocalists/beatboxers | Boss RC-505 MKII |
| Best iPad looper, period | Loopy Pro |
| Best simpler iPad option | UndoLooperGO |
| Best free desktop looper | Mobius 3 |
| Best desktop looper with character | Audio Damage Enso |
| Best desktop looper for maximalist studio sessions | MSuperLooper |
| Best desktop looper for live verse/chorus arrangement | UndoLooper |
| Best free desktop looper with verse/chorus design | UndoLooper |
| Best looper if you already live in Ableton | Ableton’s Looper device |
A note on the people who build these tools
Every name in this guide is the work of a small team or a single person who’s spent years pushing this craft forward. Michael Tyson at A Tasty Pixel. Chris Randall and Adam Schabtach at Audio Damage. Jeffrey Larson at Circular Labs. Vojtêch Meluzín at MeldaProduction. The teams at Roland/Boss, at Headrush, at Electro-Harmonix, at TC Helicon. None of these are big corporate efforts. They’re craftspeople, and the looper category has been pushed forward by their work over decades.
I built UndoLooper because I wanted a specific thing that wasn’t on the shelf yet — a Mac/Windows looper designed from the ground up around using undo and redo as live performance tools for verse/chorus arrangement. Not because anyone else’s tool was bad. Because the workflow I wanted to play with didn’t exist yet.
If you end up using a different tool from this guide, support the person who made it. Buy their full version. Leave them a review. Tell other musicians about them. This is a small craft category and it stays good because we look out for each other.
Trademark and respect notice
All product names, logos, and trademarks mentioned in this guide are the property of their respective owners. UndoLooper is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Roland/Boss, A Tasty Pixel, Audio Damage, Circular Labs, MeldaProduction, Headrush, Electro-Harmonix, Pigtronix, TC Helicon, Ableton, Apple, Bitwig, or any other company mentioned here. We mention them because they make great tools and our shared customers deserve to know about them.
Try UndoLooper
- Download UndoLooperGO for iPad (App Store)
- Download UndoLooper for Mac (App Store) — signed, notarized, one-click install. Free.
- Download Undolooper for Windows (itch.io) — standalone + VST3. Free.
- See all download options
Questions? Hit the FAQ or email us directly.