the RC loop pedals changed my life. do you play an instrument with an output? GET A LOOP PEDAL YESTERDAY.
practicing electric guitar without a loop pedal is like building a website without live server.
practicing electric guitar without a loop pedal is like building a website without live server.
Does anyone know a working software solution that just mimics a basic pedal? Should also be trustworthy, I'm hesitant to install random free VSTs.
I'm just somebody who has used it a lot, not associated to Ableton in any way.
Another popular DAW for loop-based recording is FL Studio (a little less expensive than Ableton with lifetime free updates and plenty powerful). Also a longtime user of FL.
once you get to be more of a wizard, you'll want things like backwards playback and multitrack looping and midi sync. you could progress toward more advanced boss pedals, or start looking at things like the electroharmonix 95000 (i have one, i bought it because i saw a video of reggie watts using one)
it's always gonna be a tradeoff between simplicity and complexity, and honestly more complex isn't always better. i find myself reaching for the rc-1 way more than the ehx95000 because it's so simple. just experiment, figure out how YOU like to loop. there's no right or wrong way. the gear should make you want to keep playing. if it doesn't, trade it in for something else. don't burn too much time deciding.
It takes a little effort (and sometimes money), but you can definitely get latency low enough to be able to use the DAW live. Consider that almost every electronic artist playing music on stage today is using Ableton Live.
The basic components are:
1. Make sure your OS's drivers aren't introducing too much latency. I hear horror stories about the default audio drivers on Windows but as a Mac user I've never had to worry about this.
2. Make the buffer size small in your DAW. DAWs process audio a block of samples at a time because it's much kinder to the CPU's cache and gives you better overall throughput. But chunking obviously adds latency because you don't hear a single sample from the buffer until the entire buffer is done. Controlling the buffer size lets you make the latency/performance trade-off wherever you want.
At a 48k sample rate, each sample is ~0.02 milliseconds long. So a buffer size of 1,024 adds 21ms of latency, which is low enough for doing things like tweaking effects and arranging live, but high enough that you will definitely notice it if you're playing individual notes on an instrument. Dropping the buffer size down to 128 gets you down to ~2.6ms of latency, which is essentially unnoticeable.
3. Make sure your audio interface doesn't introduce too much latency. You can find sites that measure this precisely. My experience on my Mac is that even my cheap Focusrite audio interface is low enough to work fine. If you really get into this, you can spend extra money and get interfaces with lower latency.
There are other hardware options, like Aeros loop studio or even things like Akai MPC One, for example, but these get more complex than just a simple looper.
There are basic looper pedals but I suspect most people want something like an RC202 or RC505 for basic but multitrack simple live looping.
If there a simpler, more basic place to use them, like an effects box app for raspberry pi?
If I'm not mistaken, one he does miss out on is Synth1, but then that would be 10 free VST's, and also gives www.kvraudio.com a reason to exist.
*The real problem is, people writing crappy VSTs and installing bits of crud all over my PC (and that inclludes DAW software writers), but hey,that's why backups and rollbacks exist, I guess.
To specifically answer your question "Does anyone know a working software solution that just mimics a basic pedal?" - which particular pedal? The software you may be hesitant to install may have the answer you require: I've found software that sounds better than the pedals they emulate, but aren't as easy to control (with a mouse), and are equally at the mercy of a DAW crash (looking at you Steinberg :-).
But of course, I am advocating used gear.
[1]: Also makes a pretty good headphone pre-amp that just needs USB power (like from a power brick).
Most any USB audio interface will have an "instrument" input/mode that will allow you to plug directly in and will work with Mac/Windows/Linux directly with low latency. Most of the come with some software bundles as well with free amp and pedal models.
What is cheating in music? All I can think of is deception, like lip-syncing.
Whether you prefer electronic or acoustic just comes down to personal preference. I still play alcohol powered instruments (double bass, cello), and ride an acoustic bicycle, though my friends badger me about when I'll switch to electric.