8 Best Looper Apps for iPhone (Loop Pedal Apps Compared)

The best looper app for iPhone is Loopy Pro if you want to build a whole live set with your own screen layout and plugins, Quantiloop if you want it to behave like a floor pedal, and GarageBand if you want to pay nothing. Those three, plus Group the Loop, Enso Looper and Jam Looper, loop your microphone or guitar. The last two entries are instruments with a loop recorder built in, which loop their own sounds and not a microphone; we make both, so they are marked (ours).

Prices for the six mic loopers are US App Store prices, checked in September 2026.

Best looper apps for voice and guitar (mic loopers)

A looper records a phrase, plays it back on repeat, and lets you record overdubs on top until one voice or one guitar sounds like a band. The six apps below all do that with whatever goes into the phone’s mic or an audio interface.

1. Loopy Pro (A Tasty Pixel). Free 7-day trial, then a one-time $29.99 in-app unlock. iPhone and iPad.

   You design your own performance screen out of loops, buttons, sliders and effects, then record with a count-in, from an audio threshold (it starts when you make a sound) or retrospectively, grabbing the phrase you just played. It detects loop length for you, hosts AUv3 instruments and effects, takes MIDI foot controllers, and records each loop as a separate stem for mixing later. The unlock includes 12 months of new features, and after that $14.99 upgrades are optional. Its older sibling, Loopy HD, is still sold for $4.99 but has not been updated since December 2022.

2. Quantiloop (Stephan Marx). Free with a $14.99 Pro upgrade, or buy Quantiloop Pro outright for the same price. iPhone and iPad.

   Quantiloop copies the way a hardware pedal works, with big on-screen buttons, four tracks with unlimited overdubs, and MIDI control for a foot controller. With no controller, preset the loop length and turn on auto-record or a count-in, and loops close on their own, which frees the hands of singers and beatboxers. Input effects include a transpose that turns a guitar part into a bass line, and it can host an AUv3 amp sim so the tone gets printed into the loop. The free version keeps all four tracks but gives you only part of the MIDI control, effects and input routing, and a 7-day trial of Pro fills in the rest.

3. Group the Loop (Jack Marshall). Paid, $13.99, no in-app purchases. iPhone and iPad.

   Loops live in groups for song sections. Record two chord loops into a Verse group and two into a Chorus group, then switch between the groups in real time while a master group keeps the drums going through both. It adds a drum machine, built-in effects, time stretch (change the tempo without changing the pitch), tap tempo, MIDI control and audio interface support, and its latest update came out in September 2026.

4. Enso Looper (Audio Damage). Paid, $7.99. iPhone and iPad, standalone or as an AUv3 plugin, with desktop versions for Mac, Windows and Linux.

   Enso loops like tape: up to five minutes of stereo audio, with separate play and record heads that each run anywhere from -4x to +4x, so one head can play backwards at half speed while the other records forwards at double speed. Put its tape saturation, hiss, filters and chorus in the feedback path and each pass wears the loop down a little more, like a cassette played too often. It makes the most sense as an AUv3 effect inside a host such as Loopy Pro, fed with ambient guitar or a drone; the standalone mode is for quick sketches.

Best free looper app for iPhone

5. GarageBand (Apple). Free. iPhone and iPad.

   The Live Loops grid is a looper hiding in plain sight. Give a row the Audio Recorder, double-tap a cell, tap Record, and your voice or acoustic guitar becomes a cell that loops in sync with the rest of the grid. A new take replaces whatever is in an audio cell, so give each vocal layer its own row; keyboard, drum, sampler, guitar and bass rows can stack takes instead with Merge Recordings in the track controls. When the loop works, record a Live Loops performance into Tracks view and arrange it into a song.

6. Jam Looper (Unstatic Ltd). Free, with a Pro subscription or a lifetime purchase. iPhone and iPad.

   The simplest app on the list: start recording, stop when the phrase ends, and the app takes the loop length from that first take, so there is no tempo to set first. The free version gives you four tracks, volume per track, a metronome with tap tempo and export to M4A, WAV or MP3. Pro adds eight tracks, per-track effects such as reverb, delay, pitch shift and filters, and importing an audio file to play along with. Pro costs $3.99 a week, $7.99 a month, $34.99 a year or $44.99 once, so owning it outright costs more than Loopy Pro.

If neither free pick is enough, Loopy Pro and Quantiloop both give you 7 days of the full app, enough for a week of real practice before you pay. BandLab also has a feature called Looper, but it triggers pre-made loop packs for building beats and does not record your voice or guitar into a loop.

Instrument apps with a looper built in

If you do not sing or play guitar, an instrument with its own loop recorder skips the microphone entirely, so there is nothing to plug in and no room noise in your layers. We make both apps below. They loop their own sounds only, not a microphone, and on each one the loop recorder is part of a single $4.99 unlock.

7. Gelato Synth (ours) (Gelato Audio). Free with one $4.99 in-app purchase, which includes the loop recorder. iPhone.

   Pick a tempo and a number of bars, get one bar of count-in and play; then tap +1 to add a layer with any other sound, up to eight layers, and pause, mute or remove any of them. A beat (Click, Rock, Hip Hop or Dance) plays along without using up a layer, and Snap nudges notes to the nearest sixteenth. The pads only hold notes of the scale you choose, so a bass layer, a pad layer and a lead layer all fit the key. You can save the loop as a file.

8. Gelato Chord (ours) (Gelato Audio). Free with one $4.99 in-app purchase, which includes the loop recorder. iPhone.

   It is a chord instrument first, and its loop recorder stacks up to eight layers over one of eight drum grooves, each with its own drum machine, such as an 808, a 909 or a room kit. Set the key to G major, tap in a tempo and record G, Em, C and D as a strummed layer, then a bass line in Lead mode, then an arpeggio, each layer with its own sound and mode. Loops are still there when you come back to the app.

Loop pedal app vs a real loop pedal

A hardware pedal wins on simplicity. The BOSS RC-1, for example, is one footswitch, one track and up to 12 minutes of stereo recording on a 9-volt battery, with a ring of lights showing where you are in the loop. You step on it and it records, and nothing asks you to update it halfway through a song.

An app wins once you want more than one track to manage: separate tracks you can mute and bring back, song sections, effects, undo, and a file you can send or finish later. Three things decide whether a phone can stand in for the pedal.

• Your hands. Tapping a screen mid-strum is awkward. Loopy Pro, Quantiloop and Group the Loop all take MIDI control, so a Bluetooth or USB MIDI foot controller gives you a real pedal feel. Without one, set a fixed loop length with a count-in and let the app start and stop recording for you.
• Getting sound in. Voice, beatbox and acoustic guitar can go straight into the iPhone mic. An electric guitar needs a small audio interface for the USB-C or Lightning port.
• Hearing yourself. Wear wired headphones. Through the speaker, the playing loop leaks into the mic and gets recorded again on every overdub, and Bluetooth headphones such as AirPods add enough latency (the delay between playing and hearing) to pull your timing late.

How to record your first loop on iPhone

A four-bar loop at 90 BPM lasts about 10.7 seconds, long enough for a chord progression and short enough to stay locked in. Set the tempo and a count-in, then stack layers in this order:

• Rhythm first. Beatbox a kick on beats 1 and 3 and a snare on 2 and 4, or play muted strums on every beat. Everything else leans on this layer, so redo it until it feels steady.
• Bass. Sing or play one low note per bar: A, F, C, G.
• Chords. Play Am, F, C and G, one bar each. That is i, VI, III and VII in A minor.
• A hook. Hum a short phrase using only A, C, D, E and G, the A minor pentatonic scale, which sits comfortably over all four chords.

If your app sets the loop length from your taps (Jam Looper, or any looper in free time), close the first loop on the downbeat of the next bar, the “one” after your last beat. Record that first layer at a moderate level too, because every overdub adds volume and a loud start leaves the later layers nowhere to go. When you play it for someone, start with only the rhythm layer and unmute the others one pass at a time, so the loop builds. When you want verses and a chorus out of it, our guide to turning a loop into a full song picks up from there.