Audio Damage ENSO (Looper)

[plexuss]

Automation recording is not working for me with Logic 10.4.4. I'll email them...

[V0RT3X]

Cool idea but I think it's completely useless for Ableton or Bitwig users, since you can do this already in the Clip mode.

You can absolutely NOT do overdubbing/destructuve looping with clip mode in either program. Ableton has a Looper that allows this. Looping (as the word is used by me) is NOT record a single piece of audio and loop it, it is getting a loop going that you can overdub more audio onto and control the feedback level.

Ah ok i see now, had a better look at it.

Still I don't think I'll be using any AD plugins now or in the future. I'm well covered with Unfiltered Audio stuff for all my experimental needs.

[robbmonn]

I've coded loopers, too, so we are part of a small club. Here's what I will say after spending some weeks with this one:

Enso doesn't pop or click when you use it in a standard way: silence when you enter/exit record. If you trigger the loop start (like a one-shot and the loop has sound going over the loop start/end point you get what I'm used to getting there, a pop. I don't hear a click, which is what I call a single sample jump in amplitude... there is a quick xfade in there or it is looking for zero crossings, but not a long enough xfade to mask the transient.

I think that undo/multiply/divide and all those features went out the window when they decoupled the play and record heads. It's just too complex to hold 1 to n-number of loops in memory and merge them when you start a new recording (thus a new undo buffer) while you are playing and recording in non-static different speeds and directions over a loop that could be several minutes long. But I'm with you, I like an undo.

The thing I love most about this one is that it is oriented towards what I want and need: it will loop for a long time, you can mute input, you can set post record behaviors properly, it is built from the ground up to support frippertronic style feedback and it works with my open feedback loop workflow, which means that I can do a lot with it that is impossible with other loopers. After decades of writing my own (buggy) loopers in max/MSP, having Mobius leak memory and crash, reporting bug after bug to Ableton about their looper and, recently, have Augustus Loop get very unstable in the new Live betas, I can breathe easily. Here is new code, that has some really neat functions in it, does the basics well enough and is being actively supported.

If you're looking for my constructive criticism, it's that Enso won't run with the transport stopped, which makes me sad for a number of reasons.

[Musicisbest]

Completely crashes Cubase 10 when attempting to do basic looping.

Tried it a multitude of times but it always crashes.

[experimental.crow]

I've coded loopers, too, so we are part of a small club. Here's what I will say after spending some weeks with this one:

Enso doesn't pop or click when you use it in a standard way: silence when you enter/exit record. If you trigger the loop start (like a one-shot and the loop has sound going over the loop start/end point you get what I'm used to getting there, a pop. I don't hear a click, which is what I call a single sample jump in amplitude... there is a quick xfade in there or it is looking for zero crossings, but not a long enough xfade to mask the transient.

I think that undo/multiply/divide and all those features went out the window when they decoupled the play and record heads. It's just too complex to hold 1 to n-number of loops in memory and merge them when you start a new recording (thus a new undo buffer) while you are playing and recording in non-static different speeds and directions over a loop that could be several minutes long. But I'm with you, I like an undo.

The thing I love most about this one is that it is oriented towards what I want and need: it will loop for a long time, you can mute input, you can set post record behaviors properly, it is built from the ground up to support frippertronic style feedback and it works with my open feedback loop workflow, which means that I can do a lot with it that is impossible with other loopers. After decades of writing my own (buggy) loopers in max/MSP, having Mobius leak memory and crash, reporting bug after bug to Ableton about their looper and, recently, have Augustus Loop get very unstable in the new Live betas, I can breathe easily. Here is new code, that has some really neat functions in it, does the basics well enough and is being actively supported.

If you're looking for my constructive criticism, it's that Enso won't run with the transport stopped, which makes me sad for a number of reasons.

Augustus Loop has been my go to for years ; before that it was Angstrolooper ...
looking forward to trying this one ...

[someone called simon]

I can tell you that, on the Mac, it is this, Ableton Looper and Augustus Loop. Ableton's does the one click thing (but good luck getting your foot controller to work with it,) Augustus is very, very complex.

And in between is the loopback plugin in Mainstage. And sequenced looping with Zenaudio ALK. I've used Mainstage for quite complex things live. But this plug in certainly looks worth checking out too.

[sl1914]

A demo or even a Rent to Own solution like here:
https://www.strongmocha.com/2019/03/06/ ... -own-plan/

Rent to own for a $59 plugin?

I think ALL plugins should have a demo version - but they don't. Like UVI Falcon and Omnisphere.
So the next best thing is renting it for one month (9.99$) and losing just a little money if you don't like it.

[Burillo]

two features i miss: running with transport stopped, and starting recording on input instead of on beat. still, after demoing it, bought it right away. for online jamming this is a godsend. i was using GLoop before, but it's really finicky and cuts off parts of the buffer way too often.

[zerocrossing]

I’m so excited about this... I couldn’t sleep. Instant buy. I’ve been requesting this exact thing for years. It’ll probably not totally replace Möbius, but I bet I use it more.

[zerocrossing]

It would be a bargain for me at 3x the price as my whole musical workflow is currently depending on Augustus Loop, which is very, very old and will die some day.

Why do you think that? Don’t get me wrong, I’m on Enso like millennials on iPhones, but Augustusloop works perfectly for me, and while it may not get lots of feature addition updates, they’re one of the only people who bothered to update their looper for 64 bit setups.

...and not to bag on Audio Damage, but they’re hardly a company to look for when you want a lot of active development... or even bug fixes. I had Dubstation die on me at one point and their response was basically, “Sorry. Works for us here.” I suspect it was a licensing issue with their copy production and eventually I found that it worked again.

[robbmonn]

Augustus is crashing Ableton 10.1 betas. You can’t close the GUI without a multi minute lag and when you have one running Live crashes on close.

[robbmonn]

i suspect i will continue to use AL as I have for 10 years but I have worried about it being the only tool that does what I need. Using four long loops is the heart of my workflow.

[deastman]

I don’t require complex layering, but a single undo buffer doesn’t seem like too much to ask for. Also the ability to double the length of a loop buffer, making two copies of the existing content, or halving the buffer and throwing out half of the existing content. The reason being that you might want to start with a one measure loop, then overdub a four measurepart on top of that, and then a sixteen measure part on top of that. You would want the shorter bits to keep repeating, while giving you a larger buffer for the longer overdubs.

[robbmonn]

Those features just don't work in my head on a looper with decoupled play and record heads. Maybe someone smarter than me knows what would happen if you double your buffer length while you are recording backwards at 25% speed and playing forwards at 60% speed. Also, this looper supports "dub in place" which means that you can't just go mucking about with your buffer length as you are destructively recording your feedback into the loop while you mix in the clean signal. Doubling the buffer length would give you pops and clicks as you would have effectively stopped recording into the copy of the buffer when you made the copy.

I think that the best way to think about this looper is that it is a tape looper. Frippertronics but with all the fiddly shit fixed for you. AND it has some other cool shit with sectors, that other loopers haven't had before. AND it has decoupled read and rec heads, which is also pretty cool. But the tape loop is the tape loop. It can go faster or slower but you can't adjust the length of the loop (the size of the buffer.)

It's not an Echoplex Digital Pro... but the echoplex couldn't do this stuff either.

But I hear you and you have good ideas. That's the best part of looping for me -- you think of something walking around one day and go home and hack it out. Sometimes you can't do it, but sometimes you CAN and it's awesome.

[rbx11]

This looks... Pretty nice, even if I'm not totally understanding all it does. Will have to check out the demo. True story, I was just thinking of ways I could layer sound on top of sound, then this comes along. Maybe I should think of a gift of a million dollars, to me.