Boss RC-5 editor and loop manager — LooperCat

One-button connect: SysEx → STORAGE → a flash drive. Disconnect is just as polite: eject the card and send the pedal back to looping.

All 99 slots in one table: name, duration, bars, tempo, one-shot, WAV file. A lamp in the row is the setting: clicking it flips that setting straight from the table, and which lamps stay in sight is your call. Live refresh as the pedal comes and goes. Select in bulk — Cmd/Ctrl-click, Shift-click, ⌘A / Ctrl-A — and the right-click menu acts on the whole selection.

Listen straight from a slot: double-click — waveform, seeking, a preview volume fader, output device picker. No copying files around just to learn what lives in slot 37.

Edit: the Properties pane under the table — a name of twelve characters (exactly what the pedal’s display holds), tempo with the bar count that follows from it, Play Count-In, one-shot; and in the table itself — inline rename, trim with a gapless preview of the cut, clear a slot, drag one slot onto another to swap them. Plus the Bars column, which fixes the tempo the RC-5 guesses wrong on odd-length loops: LooperCat writes tempo and bars together so the onboard rhythm finally agrees with the music.

Move audio both ways. Push audio here… into an empty slot, Replace audio… over an occupied one, and the file does not have to be a WAV: MP3, AIFF, FLAC and Ogg go in the same. Everything is brought to the format the pedal actually wants: sample rate, bit depth, channels, header bytes. So a bounce from your DAW, a ready-made backing track, an MP3 off the net — all of it becomes a loop with no separate ritual. The pedal’s float stays native, everything else is recomputed on the way in. With an MP3 the silence the encoder puts before the downbeat is bitten off at the door, so the loop does not stumble at the seam. The old loop goes to the app’s trash first. The way back out is just as direct: any loop pulls out as a plain WAV.

Level the volume. Loops pile up over months: one recorded at rehearsal, the next bounced straight out of a DAW. Each sits at its own volume — one whispers, the next one shouts. Normalize pulls the whole setlist to one mark: measured per ITU-R BS.1770, then one flat shift across the loop, with no compression at all. The mark is -18 LUFS by default, ReplayGain’s own, and it turns in the settings. One slot — right-click. The whole setlist — select it, one command. New uploads level themselves once you tick the box. Nothing clips: a boost stops at a true peak of -1 dBTP, and a loop with a high peak honestly lands below the target. The LUFS column shows which loop lives at which volume. An orange figure means Normalize can change that loop’s volume. The original moves to the app’s trash first.

Route loops to outputs: right-click a slot → Downmix to mono — left and right are averaged into one signal, and you choose where it goes: OUTPUT A, OUTPUT B or both. Loops run out of one output while a live instrument keeps the other, with nothing bleeding across — a proper split for two amps or two mixer channels. The fold averages, it never sums, so it cannot push a loop into clipping; the stereo original moves to the app’s trash first, so changing your mind is free. The RC-5 has no pan of its own: the placement lives in the file — channel 1 reaches OUTPUT A, channel 2 reaches OUTPUT B. Measured on real hardware.

Walk on stage: Play Count-In — the pedal beats one measure of count and then rolls into the loop, so a backing track is stage-ready in one tap.

Stay safe: config backups before every mutation, write-generation counters — the same discipline the pedal itself keeps, a sweep for the macOS invisibles (._*, .DS_Store) that Finder itself leaves underfoot, a card-consistency doctor, and honest ghost detection when the pedal leaves without saying goodbye. The backup and the sweep answer by hand too — for a card that lived a life before LooperCat.