Loopback not responding as expected

Hello,

yesterday I bought MainStage, primarily for using it as a looper. Alas, I have exactly the same problem as you described. Overdubbing loops in Loopback put in a audio strip simply does not work. I can't believe this has not been fixed for so many years....

I;m having a similar issue.

When the loop comes back to the start it randomly clears what I want to be the the first take, Sometimes it keeps the first take but will clear the second. Sometimes it works the way I need and multiple loops play on top the playback section of the backing tracks that are on cycle mode.

If the record switch is deactivated just before the start of the loop it will take but the gap thats left is not workable.

Once the record,stop ,clear switches have been pressed to the point where theres working takes it will function the way I need.

Sometimes for the session,sometimes for 2 or 3 songs,

The guide mentions pressing the record switch twice to set loop length. Not sure how that works in a live setting.

So I have all my playback sections that I loop over set at 8 bars and set the loopback at bars and sync.

Anyway I'm getting dizzy trying to describe this.

Have you come across any fix for your situation?

Hi

HerrBergs wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to get Loopback to work in MainStage 3.0.3 but it is just strange.

I think most of this was fixed in MS 3.0.4?

CCT

Hi Dazy

I am experiencing this right now. It only happens when using Loopback on audio channels. They work perfectly on instrument channels, every time. I thought I had fixed it with audio channels by having the output buss to a patch bus, and then running a Loopback instance on that... it worked for a couple of songs I have put together. Then I tried the technique for a new song I'm working on, and bugger me if it's not clearing the first pass of vocals I record, and then doing the same on the next... and THEN, if I just bloody mindedly keep attempting overdubs, SUDDENLY recording certain passes, and not certain others!!! AAAAAHHH!!!!! The unbelievable frustration. My whole set depends on these overdubs for vocal harmony parts.

With a couple of the songs, I record a backing part right up front, then stop it recording, leave it playing, then hit a record mapped midi switch later to overdub a second vocal, in harmony to the first. This works fine. But now I am trying to have a one bar vocal motive that I keep stacking with harmonies on each pass, and I simply can't stop it recording then start it again because there isn't enough time in one bar, not to mention it would chop the end off abruptly before starting the loop again.

It does not bode well that you wrote this problem up in December of last year, and they STILL haven't fixed it. I've seen it complained about in a few different places. I've written to them twice now, and no joy. I think I may do a Shawshank, and send a complaint every single day for a month!

Did you find any sort of solution yourself?

Alex

Hello there! Any luck? I've been losing a lot of time trying to make loopback work as it should. The weird thing is that it works whenever it wants: some overdubs are recorded, others not. Sometimes it doesn't overdub anything after the first take. In my case I found out that loopback works ok if I don't use any audio interface and just play around with my MacBook Pro built-in mic. Because of that I thought it might be my audio interface (Presonus Firebox), so I tried with another one, experiencing the same issue 😕

I would appreciate any feedback about this. Thanks!

Well, Pepioca, believe it or not I did my best impression of Andy Dufresne and called Apple, not expecting whoever answered the phone to know what the **** I was talking about. I was passed from person to person at Apple, until somehow, to my utter surprise, I found myself talking to a member of a very small team who represent the pro audio app tech support department! The guy literally has lunch with the engineers who fix Logic and Mainstage bugs. Long story short, he remotely connected with my Macbook, watched me reproduce the Loopback bug, went off to do it himself, and concluded Loopback has bugs. He wrote a report and sent it off to the engineering department. They had no idea Loopback won't do as it's told! Among the things I showed him were the wiping of audio after the first loop cycling into the second, refusal to acknowledge time signature in Loopback, and the strange intermittency of these bugs. He reassured me that these would be addressed in the next Mainstage update.

During the process of looking at my computer from his, he saw my set up in Mainstage and commented that what I was doing was pretty sophisticated (if I do say so myself), so he asked me to keep in contact with him in future about other bugs I find, saying he considered me an advanced user. So, in the meantime, if any of you read this and have weird bugs you've noticed in Mainstage, I have a channel of communication back to the guys who can fix it, so I'll check this thread from time to time and relay things to their tech support department for all our benefits!

: )

Wow! That's awesome! Well, I guess we'll have to sit and wait. Too bad my solo project relies entirely on loopback 😕

Thanks a lot for replying and doing the nasty work for all of us suffering with loopback bugs 🙂

Mine relies on it, too. Strangely, I've found programming the thing and then just assuming it's going to do what I want it to do has led to it working every time. I can't explain it, I just set it to do what I want, and after some of the expected nefarious behaviour, and a bit of saving, closing the project and reopening it a bunch, it begins to play ball. I have at least 8 loopback instances in each of my projects, and so far so good. I am coming up to where I am going to need one instance to record vocals for 2 bars, and then allow me to overdub for the next 8 in one of my songs. We'll see what happens with that. I always set bar lengths, I'm not sure if that has something to do with it.

But yeah, I'm quite happy to relay major bugs to the guy I've been corresponding with... keep me posted.

By the way, try routing your audio for the track whose signal you want to loop through a patch bus and stick the Loopback instance on that. It seems to be a little more reliable on a patch bus aux channel.

Hey everyone, So this is still an issue a year or so later... is anyone still experiencing this?

My solution to the issue!!!!

I was having the same issue. I tried a ton of different setups with different send options. Nothing worked. I could loop software instruments normally, but anything coming from my audio interface (focusrite scarlet) would clear out the moment loopback returned to origin. The internal mic on my macbook actually worked properly, but that's no real solution for live performing. I searched online for about 3 hours last night, reading every thread I could along the way. No answers anywhere. Just confusion. So I called Apple today and here's the steps we took that fixed it.

1) The guy had me create another account with admin privileges. Then I opened up mainstage. Low and behold, loopback worked fine. So he said there was something set improperly in preferences in my account. So we returned to my account and...

2) We removed the preferences settings file from the library (returning it to default). Mac > users > [computer name] > Library > preferences > com.apple.mainstage3.plist

he just had me drag that file to my desktop (just in case it didn't do anything we could return it). Opened mainstage. Tested loopback. It worked! Tested it out on a session that had not been working. Still worked!

I don't know what caused the problem. I just got mainstage a few days ago. I'm just happy to have it fixed. I know most of this thread is more than a year old, but I wanted to post a possible solution for people as I know I couldn't find anything when I was looking.

UPDATE: Upon further testing, it's not 100%. It's better than it was, but it's still not working right. Now my first take will save, but the second may disappear when returning to origin. Or, the first two takes are set, I stop recording and then want to add 3 takes on top of it. The first one didn't work, the next two did. It's finicky. I'll contact apple to see if they have more ideas.

UPDATE #2: it seems as though there may be a threshold level for loopback to work. Otherwise it assumes you were making a blank loop to record on top of. That's my going theory. I'll update with more info after further testing. For now, try turning up the volume of whatever is going into loopback.

UPDATE #3: Please ignore my original post. It actually had nothing to do with fixing the problem. I tested loopback pretty thoroughly tonight and found that there is a threshold around -24db. If you don't go above that at some point in your loop, things won't work right. Even if you're flirting with that number, it probably won't go well. Bring your mic preamp up (or increase the send level on your bus, or something else similar) and you should be good. I asked the guy at Apple who's been helping me if there's a threshold slider we can mess with so we can have low volumes. I'll let you know if I hear back any good news on that.

I tested my theory through my audio interface, the built in mic, and a software instrument. The issue typically doesn't show up with software instruments or the built in mic because their levels are both set very high. But I made them real quiet and had the same issue as with my audio interface. All of them performed perfectly when the levels were high. I used an organ with drawbars to find the threshold. Tested over and over, adding a little more each time to see where the threshold was. Feel free to try the same thing out yourself!
I'm fairly certain everyone who originally posted here is long gone and won't find this, but for those of you who stumble on it, I hope this helps. I was pretty bummed out for a few days as I was really excited to use Loopback. Hopefully this fixes your being bummed out as well!