Loopers

If you want a live looper on the pi-Stomp, the LV2 catalogue has three real choices. SooperLooper is the LV2 port of Jesse Chappell's LADSPA single-loop engine — the Echoplex DNA, record/overdub/undo/redo. ALO is a six-loop rig with BPM sync and MIDI control. Loopor is a single-loop alternative with a stack-based undo history:

Our pick: SooperLooper

SooperLooper is the LV2 port of Jesse Chappell's LADSPA looper, packaged by the MOD team. Single loop, 400 s sample memory, 512-sample crossfade ramps at loop boundaries. The LV2 surface exposes 6 control ports: input, output, play_pause, record, reset, undo, redo, dryLevel. Undo pops a linked-list chunk; redo pushes one back. The underlying LADSPA plugin has ~20 control ports (multiply, insert, replace, scratch, rate, tap-tempo, quantize, round, multi-control, feedback, wet) — all unwired in the LV2 wrapper, all defaulted to graceful values. What you get is a clean record/overdub/undo/redo looper, not the full Echoplex feature set.

For a live guitar rig that is the right amount of feature. dryLevel follows the same log law as the mod-audio Mixer's volume (0 = −45 dB, 1 = 0 dB). CPU is one input multiply, one wet multiply, one output add, one buffer write per sample — ~5 ops/sample, cheap.

Map Record and Play/Pause to footswitches; Undo/Redo to expression-pedal or second footswitch. The sooperlooper-2x2 variant is the stereo build — same DSP, 10 ports (inL/inR/outL/outR + same 6 controls).

New to loading plugins? See Plugins & Effects for how to browse and add them in MOD-UI.

Also great: ALO

ALO (Paul Sherwood) is a different shape of looper. Six fixed-length loops of 2.88 M samples (60 s at 48 kHz), always recording into a rolling buffer in the background. Pressing a loop button arms it; the loop's start point snaps to the next phrase boundary. In sync mode (Global BPM) the loop length is set by the Bars parameter; in free-running mode the first loop's recorded length sets the length for all six. Threshold detection triggers the actual record start. MIDI control: MIDI Base sets the lowest note; loops 1–6 are notes Base..Base+5.

Loop 6 is the special one: it outputs the loop while replacing it with the input signal, so if you feed the output back through an effect, that effect is applied each pass — the classic Frippertronics feedback path. Reset modes (0–3) control how and when loops are wiped. Click track at 880 Hz (downbeat) / 440 Hz (other beats). Instant Loops (0/3/6) makes loops stop/resume on button press rather than waiting for the loop boundary.

What you give up: ALO's reset is double-press, not an undo stack. There is no Undo/Redo — once a loop is overdubbed, the previous state is gone (modulo reset). You give up the Echoplex vocabulary and Jesse Chappell's specific DSP for a six-loop, BPM-synced, MIDI-driven rig with a click. Different use case, not a strict runner-up.

Also considered

Loopor (Stevie, stevie67/loopor) is a single-loop live looper with threshold-triggered record, a stack-based undo/redo history, dub-on-dub continuous overdub, and double-press reset. Same single-loop territory as SooperLooper with a stack instead of a linked list under the undo. Zero occurrences in shared pedalboards — less usage data than SooperLooper — but a competent alternative if you prefer a stack semantics or want to hack the source (ISC license, small codebase).

Audio File (Carla, falkTX) is a sample player, not a looper. It will loop a file but does not record and does not tempo-match. Use it for backing tracks, not live looping.

Record-Mono / Stereo / Quad (brummer10's screcord) are file recorders that save wav/ogg to disk — capture only, with no looping or overdub facility.

Neural Record (brummer10) is a round-trip latency-measured capture plugin for AIDA-X / NAM training — plays input.wav and records target.wav in sync. Not a looper; a model-capture utility dressed as a recorder.

Credits