Loop by Zaweba works offline, with no account or cloud

A lot of music apps now start with a sign-in screen. Loop by Zaweba doesn't. There is no account to create, no cloud storage and no telemetry. Every loop, note and recording is made and rendered on your computer, and nothing about your songs goes anywhere unless you send it yourself.

What working offline means in practice

You can make music on a train, in a cabin with no signal, or on a computer that is never connected to the internet. The 210 loops, the synth, the drum machine, the sampler and the 128 General MIDI instruments are all installed with the app. Exports are rendered on your computer, including MP3 and OGG, which use the bundled FFmpeg.

Nothing is waiting on a server, so nothing slows down when the connection is poor. There is no sync to wait for when you open a song, and no message telling you a feature is unavailable because you are offline. The app behaves the same on a desk at home as it does on a laptop in a field.

Your songs stay yours

Songs save as .zloop files wherever you choose, with your recordings and samples inside them. There is no copy in someone else's cloud. That matters if you record your own voice or instrument, if you are making music for a client, or if you simply prefer your creative work to stay private until you are ready to share it.

The loops that come with Loop were generated by Loop's own code and played by its own synth, drum machine and the MIT-licensed FluidR3_GM SoundFont, and they may be used royalty-free in your own music. You don't need to be signed in to anything to use what you make.

Good for young people and classrooms

No account also means no email address to hand over and no profile to manage. That makes Loop simple to put on a family computer for a child who wants to make beats for their videos, or on school computers for a music lesson. Pupils can start making music as soon as the app opens. The first launch even opens a house starter so something plays at once, which is a gentle way in for someone who has never made a song before.

The trade-off

Offline has one consequence worth being honest about. Backups are your job. A song saved only on one computer is lost if that computer fails. Since a .zloop holds everything the song needs in one file, backing up is just copying it to another drive, a USB stick or whatever backup you already use.

Sharing works the same way: export a WAV or MP3 and send it however you like. If you are making video, File > Send the last export to Video by Zaweba hands it straight over, and Play by Zaweba can open it for a listen.

Why build it this way

Making music should feel like your own space to try things, with nothing watching and nothing to log in to. The Zaweba apps are free software under the EULA and offline by design, and Loop by Zaweba follows the same idea from the first click: open it, choose a genre and tempo, and the starter song is already playing.