Recording & looping

The traditional deal with recording is that you must know something good is coming before it arrives. rip chopper refuses the deal. The app keeps a rolling memory of everything — your pad performance, your audio input, your camera — so recording is mostly a decision you make after the fact.

Rewind: the retroactive record button

At any moment, the last stretch of everything (90 seconds by default) is recoverable. Played something good? Hover the live strip and click its Rewind overlay. What opens is the capture editor: your triggered pads as blocks on a timeline, your input audio as a waveform, your camera as a lane — the recent past, laid out and editable.

Nothing was armed. Nothing was planned. It’s just there.

And it works even when no pads were played at all — hum something over the mic, click the Rewind overlay in the live strip, and chop the hum. In that case Rewind skips the capture editor entirely and takes you straight to the chopper, with the last stretch of input (and camera, if it was on) imported as a new source. There is nothing to arrange when nothing was triggered — only something to cut up.

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Takes: when you do want to plan

The Take button records on purpose: bar-aligned takes with a count-in, or free-length takes for instruments. Two niceties:

• Auto-arm. A take without a count-in doesn’t start when you press the button — it starts when you make a sound. Press Take, settle your hands, and the recording begins at your first note, trimmed to the actual attack. No dead air, no clipped pick attack.
• Loop record into the takes system collects variation after variation, up to a stack of them, and any take can be unpacked into its own clip.

The live looper

Hold an instrument (or a melody in your head) and press Take in loop mode: lay a base loop, then layer passes over it — each pass auto-panned across the stereo image so the stack stays wide. The looper’s controls live right on the canvas: progress ring, pass chips, undo, ×2/½ to double or halve the loop length, and adopt loop tempo to make the project follow what you just played.

Camera passes stay visible in an adaptive stage grid as the loop grows. The grid packs videos together around the center and chooses rows or columns from the camera and canvas proportions, including vertical stacks for landscape cameras on a portrait canvas. In Settings you can choose a fixed layer count instead; its slots are reserved up front, and filling the final slot finishes the session. In the capture editor, switch between the performed, adaptive, and fixed-max visual layouts, drag any tile into a manual arrangement, or include played chop videos in the same reflow. The centered control cluster at the bottom of each camera provides mute, volume, per-cycle attack, and pan. Once the loop has at least two passes, its Stack list appears at the upper left of the canvas: drag a pass higher or lower to change its visual depth without changing its mute group or choke behavior. The order carries into the capture editor and the saved render.

Two gestures worth the price of admission:

• Flashback. Double-press Take and the loop cycle that just went by — the one you didn’t record — is pulled out of the rolling buffer and joins the stack at the next boundary, in phase. Press again to reach one cycle further back. The good take is never gone.
• The camera is in the loop too. With the camera enabled, every pass records a video tile alongside its audio, arranged on the canvas as the stack grows. Loop yourself into a one-person band, visibly.

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The capture editor

Every recording road leads here. The capture editor is where a captured performance becomes material:

• Select a range (it snaps to loop boundaries) and preview it in place.
• Mix per lane: mute, solo, gain, pan — editor-local, so your live pad settings stay untouched.
• Restack lanes by dragging — row order is layer order.
• Hide a lane’s video while keeping its audio (the eye toggle), or nudge a whole lane earlier/later to fix timing.
• Loop layout: a looper session can be laid out stacked (all passes in one window) or build-up (base loop alone, then each layer entering one cycle later — the arrangement-ready version).
• Bounce one layer by itself, either composited in the frame or at its original size.
• Render the selection to a clip — usually a loop — which lands on a pad, ready to be played, re-chopped, or built on.

That last step closes the loop that defines the app: perform → capture → render → the result is an instrument again.

Resampling

The Record button is the classic sampler move: capture your live pad performance (and, if you like, the external input with it) as one new piece of audio-video material. Guided overdub takes it further — bounce a selection to a backing loop, put it on a pad, start it, and arm the recorder so your next pass layers over it.

Cameras and screens

• Webcam: one global camera setting shared by Rewind, Take, and Record, with a rolling history — so Rewind recovers your face along with your sound.
• Screen recording: grab a few seconds of anything playing on your Mac from right inside the import flow; it comes in as an ordinary source, ready to chop.

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