IDA

The Problem

Conventional loopers force the musician to fight the tool at exactly the wrong moment. You must declare a loop's length before you play, arm recording before inspiration strikes, and commit your in and out points the instant your foot hits the switch — so imprecise timing is punished and good ideas are lost. They lock everything to a single rigid tempo grid, so multiple meters cannot coexist and small rounding errors accumulate until a loop drifts out of alignment. And they stop at the loop, handing arrangement and mixing off to other tools.

IDA removes that friction: capture ideas the instant they happen — even retroactively — keep them exact forever, and develop and arrange them without ever leaving the instrument.

Key Features

• Retroactive capture - The tape is always running, so you bookmark ideas after you play them — no record-arming, no penalty for loose timing
• Phrase-based thinking - A phrase, not a loop, is the unit of musical thought, with its own role, intent, and internal time
• Polymetric & polytemporal - Multiple meters and free, unmetered material live together in one phrase, with no shared grid
• Exact, drift-free timing - Symbolic time keeps the hundredth repetition as tight as the first and preserves micro-timing and human feel precisely
• Recursive arrangement - Loops, phrases, sections, songs, and whole set lists share one data model and one set of gestures
• Two full creative mixers - A complete mixer on each side of an always-recording tape, handling audio, MIDI, video, and files as first-class signals
• Bulletproof reliability - Audio never glitches, tape data survives power loss, and every degradation is announced rather than hidden
• Decades-proof sessions - A single portable archive whose musical content stays openable and re-renderable far into the future

Preview

An early look at IDA in development — the interface and workflow are still evolving.

Read the White Paper

IDA is documented in depth — its first principles, the concept of time as symbolic rather than numeric, the always-recording tape, and the recursive structure that unifies loops, phrases, and whole performances.

Read the IDA White Paper View on GitHub