live looper use

[christofloffer]

a friend of mine is having some issues. he has a tablet, a mac (with a fairly old operating system from what i can gather) and a Boss RC-30 looper station. what he originally wanted to do was to use a drum sequencer app on the tablet as an instrument in its own right. the idea was to build up the drum sequence live so that he could drop stuff in and out, then use the looper to sort out some bass (by using an octaver on the guitar, although this is changing now), guitars and keys. giving a kind of live house lounge type of feel.
however he has been having some infuriating issues with timing. he has been a musician for 30 odd years and still plays in a band now so its not like he is new to the whole thing, just fairly new to the tech. the biggest issue comes from the app and looper. basically when he tries to loop the drums it gradually wanders out of sync with the looper. so he tried uploading static drum loops into the looper itself and now it has a tiny little pause at the end of each loop. obviously this doesnt work if you loop other bits in time with the original as guitar and keys loops seem to stay in time.
i am convinced that its the app he is using. i think that either it runs slightly faster or slower than what it says, but not by a whole beat. as if it is looping at 120.3bpm which obviously would slowly run out over each repetition, or would cause the Boss to correct it by leaving a pause to make it 121bpm in order to sync the track with its own timing. is this likely? i think its a free app so i figure it may have issues.

its driving him up the wall though. it means he cant play the sequencer and has had to resign himself to uploading pre-made tracks to the looper. not the end of the world in my eyes but even this doesnt work. its a shame as he likes the app and the touch screen side of it. the alternative is to find a drum sequencer for the mac that will work on older operating systems. i use hydrogen myself and we are going to see if that steps too but it doesnt work on his mac.

thought or ideas?

[BigRedX]

All his devices need to be sync'd together. Probably using MIDI clock or even better MTC. One device needs to be the master tempo source and all the others slaved from that.

If he'd just letting them all run independently of each other and hoping that they will all stay in sync then he's on to a losing battle. Also bear in mind that not all iPad apps are capable of outputting or responding to clock information.

To help further we'll need a lot more information like what apps he is running on the tablet and Mac and what versions of the OS they are running under. What interfaces he has on each device and how they are all connected together. Then it might be possible sort out what is going wrong and how to make it work if possible.