Getting started

There’s a moment this app is built around. You drop a video in, the waveform appears with a row of cut marks already laid across it, you press a key — and a half-second of someone else’s movie plays because you told it to, in time, under your fingers. Everything else in rip chopper exists to get you to that moment faster and to give you somewhere to go after it.

This page gets you there.

Install

rip chopper is a Mac app. Download it from the link in your invite email, drag it to Applications, and open it.

The first launch sets up the analysis tools it uses for beat detection and stem separation. On Apple Silicon, stem separation runs on the GPU.

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Make a project

A project is a workspace: the videos you’ve pulled in, the clips you’ve cut, the pads you’ve laid them on, your tempo, your canvas. Make one project per idea, per song, per experiment — they’re cheap.

Bring in a video

Drag any video file into the window. Music videos, concert footage, home movies, cartoons — if it plays on your Mac, it chops. Audio files work too (drum loops, one-shots, full songs); they get the whole chopping workflow, just without a picture.

Don’t have a file handy? Use Record screen in the left app rail. Play something in your browser, grab thirty seconds of it, and it lands in the app as ordinary source material.

The workspace follows the material as you work: acquisition actions in the narrow left rail, your chops and selected-clip controls in the next column, then the composition canvas. Chop, Sample, and Record screen all live in that acquisition group.

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Your first chop

When a video comes in, the chopper opens on it: the waveform, wrapped over three rows like lines of text, with a filmstrip of frames running above it.

By the time you’ve looked at it, it’s probably already chopped. The Transients tool runs automatically and drops cut marks on the 32 strongest hits it hears — drum smacks, word starts, door slams. Each pair of marks is a future pad.

You can stop here. Really. Press Create, and every slice lands on a pad.

But if you want to meddle (you want to meddle):

• Drag a marker to move a cut. Shift+click to add one. Alt+click to delete.
• Press Space to play, and Enter to drop a cut right at the playhead while it plays. Chopping by ear, at speed, is the good stuff.
• Change the Hits count — 8, 16, 32, All — as an upper limit, and adjust Minimum strength when you want quieter or only more confident attacks.

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Play it

Your keyboard is now a sampler. The 40 keys of the main grid each hold a slice. Press one. Press several. Notice the video: every pad you hold is on screen, composited together live.

A few things to try in your first minute:

• Hold a chord of three pads and watch three moments of the same video share the canvas.
• Tap one pad rhythmically — each press restarts the slice, audio and picture together.
• Find two pads that sound good in a row and alternate them until it’s a beat. (This is the whole art form. Welcome.)

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Keep what happened

Here’s the part to internalize early: rip chopper is always listening. You don’t arm a recording before you play. When something good happens, click the live strip’s Rewind overlay — the last minute and a half of your playing appears on a timeline, and you can select the good bar, render it to a loop, and put that on a pad.

For intentional capture, use the three controls immediately left of the live strip’s camera preview: Perform records the live sampler performance, while Loop (free) and Loop (clock) build unclocked or bar-quantized loop performances.

Play first. Decide later. That’s the loop the whole app is shaped around.

Where to next

• Core concepts — the five ideas everything else builds on. Ten minutes, worth it.
• Chopping — the four chopping tools in depth.
• Recording & looping — Rewind, takes, and the live looper.