my live looping music app is alive! do you want to test it?

Over the past four years I have been building ursund, my own software for music making. It is a cross-platform digital audio workstation based on live looping. The interface is centered around a dynamic network map that is automatically generated from all the sounds you add. All the loops become a part of a structure that you can interact with to alter the sound and behaviour of specific loops. The workflow is tailored for improvisation and immediacy, allowing you to create full compositions on the fly.
Conceptually the aim is to fully embrace the old idea of “the studio as an instrument” but in the modern age of software. It aims to find the sweetspot between the simplicity and immediacy of playing an instrument and the fine grained sound design possibilities of more standard music software.

The why

TLDR: I really wanted to as existing tools just did not give me the freedom of expression I knew could be possible, and I was stubborn enough to actually go through with building it.

The longer story is that music and computers have been the main passions (obsessions) in my life since I was a wee kid and mixing these worlds together is what I most enjoy doing.
I primarily play acoustic instruments, and have amassed a collection of weird sound toys and musical gizmos that fill my room. For a long time I would play each one separately, and produce pieces using Ableton Live and the like where you stack things on top of each other carefully in order to create what I’d call “an object of music”.
I do love this process, but coming from a mostly instrumental background I missed the immediacy you have when simply playing an instrument. When playing an instrument there’s usually no decisions to be made that requires you to stop playing or change focus from the music to the machine. It is all alive, happening and growing in the moment. Whereas working with software often feels like a buerocratic process, with seemingly arbitrary road blocks and forced decisions.
At the time I also started playing more live on stage and could not see a way to translate my productions into the live context while still remaining fluid and creative.
As my live practice grew I started using live looping pedals and fell in love with it immediately. The simplicitly and immediacy of just stomping on a lil button to create full on compositions out of nothing is just insanely fun and addicting. But as much as I loved it I found it lacking in nuance when it came to decisions about sound. It worked live but making it sound good and “professional” afterwards was difficult or even impossible as all the sounds were printed ontop of each other. There was no way to properly polish things, at least not the way I was used to doing in standard music production software.
That’s when I noticed this annoying polarity of music technology - you either have all of the sound design control but none of the playfulness, or all of the playfulness but none of the sound design.
I tried my best to find options and to wrangle Ableton into the shape I wanted, using things like ClyphX macros and even custom user scripts which did expand a lot of things but very quickly became a hacky and buggy mess when faced with the tiniest bit of complexity. It became clear that I was trying to make a fish climb a tree.

I realized the only way to achieve the workflow I envisioned would be to build my own system. So I did.
It has been a long and ardous journey writing this thing, with at least three full rewrites, many different languages and frameworks, many quits and even more starts. After a while though I figured out more and more of what I wanted and needed for both the technical and the musical side. Now for the past year it has been the main music software I use in my own creation.
Honestly I still can’t believe I’ve made it this far!

I will write more about this process and technical things at a later time, but for now lets focus on the stuff y’all wanna know, what does it dooooo?!?!

Notable features

• audio live looper that creates a dynamic and interactive map of all loops, grouped together by time

• individual control of each loop, allowing you start/stop them and other parameters.

• loop lengths can be different and still sync together

• retroactive looping - loops can be added after the sound has happened as opposed to most looping pedals where you have to explicitly tell it when to start a new loop recording (this solves the impossible task of having to know that your next bar is gonna be a banger worth looping !!)

• audio effect system with lush reverbs, delays, distortions, etc. (using the FAUST dsp language)

• randomized/generative effects on a per-loop basis* like automatic panning of each loop in the stereo field

• MIDI/OSC connectivity*

• extremely cross-platform, running on MacOS, Linux, Windows, Android, and even in a web browser**. iPhone/iPad support will be added later.

• stem recording and export of raw audio of each loop

• and more…

*not quite fully working/expanded upon yet
**the web browser version is atm not fully standalone, but rather allows you to remotely connect to a running ursund session on a different computer. I use this to control ursund on my studio computer from my tablet.

Lists are all well and good but for a better demo I’d recommend checking the video demo:

what now & how can you test it?

Thanks to everyone that has signed up for testing and shared their interest so far!
(If you have not signed up yet check out https://ursund.org)

I aim to be more public about this project and have it openly available for more people to try it out as it has now reached a stage of decent stability. It’s stable enough for me to feel comfortable using it live on stage, but it is still experimental software with many rough edges. Many of which I am aware of but many that I’ve yet to consider. That’s where y’all come in!

ursund is now publically available for testing by anyone! It’s free (for now) and without any trial restrictions.
I’ll probably sell it at some point but I have a million things I want to add and fix before a first “official” release.

The downloads can be found on my patreon which I just launched:
https://patreon.com/c/amomentunfolding
You do not need to pay or become a patron to access the download, but I would love it if you did! You joining the free tier would also be great!
I started working on this project over four years ago but have not been able to dedicate as much time as I would like to because of having to spend time on the whole survival thing. If you want this project to keep existing and growing then please consider supporting my work. Or hire me! I am a freelance software engineer usually working on full stack web server projects.

That’s all for now. So please try it out, have fun, and send me any feedback! Better yet please send me the music you make with it! I am so excited to hear what you will make.
Here is one thing I have made with it. A loopy walk through the forest:

Wishing y’all the best

/ johan