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 VectorMorph

Licensing

IDA is commercial, proprietary software — licensed, not sold. Work you create with IDA is yours, and no royalty is owed on it.

IDA embeds OTTO complete. Kits, patterns, songs, and effect presets are sold per pack, and the entitlement that unlocks a pack governs it inside IDA exactly as it does in OTTO — using IDA grants no additional access to content you have not purchased.

Versions of IDA released before 2026 were distributed under the AGPLv3 and remain under it for anyone who received them.