Loopcloud vs Splice - A Sample Library Showdown!

Sample libraries are a music producer's ultimate convenience. These pre-recorded, royalty-free sounds can quickly enhance music compositions and help streamline the creative process. We've outlined 10 of the best sample libraries for you to learn about here. And we have an article on the top royalty free sample packs that you should consider as well. But the two leading cloud-based sample libraries, LoopCloud and Splice, are hard to beat. And both offer an abundance of high-quality samples at comparable prices, making it difficult for producers to determine which platform better suits their needs.

Unlike traditional sample libraries, these cloud-based sample libraries save you from downloading and managing vast files on your hard disk. They also ensure you're not lost in an ocean of samples, with only a fraction being useful. Your custom-tailored sample collection is accessible from anywhere, paving the way for collaboration opportunities and portability. Examining the merits and drawbacks in this Loopcloud vs Splice showdown will help you make an informed choice for your unique music projects.

The issue of royalties is a major worry for music producers who rely on sampling bits and pieces of other’s people’s music. When a sound or piece of music is sampled and utilized in another work, the original copyright owner receives a royalty payment.

If the part that you’re sampling happens to be famous and owned by a major label, the royalties you end up paying amount to thousands of dollars depending on the length and extent to which you’ve sampled them. That’s where royalty-free sampling has been a breath of fresh air to music producers who generally rely on listening and incorporating bits and pieces of music into their tracks for inspiration.

Are Splice & LoopCloud Royalty Free?

LoopCloud and Splice both provide access to 100% royalty-free sound libraries for creative use. Sounds from their collections may be used in your tracks and released on major streaming platforms, and monetized without worrying about needing to pay royalties.

Since the samples found on Loopcoloud and Splice aren't like the ones found on Tracklib, where you’re paying and sampling released tracks that have copyright protection, you won't have to sweat over it.

However, bear in mind that you can't directly use these samples and sell them as your own sample packs, as that would violate compliance. So make sure to read our article about the leading royalty free sample packs as well.

Royalties Winner: Tie

LoopCloud and Splice both provide royalty-free sample libraries, resulting in a tie in this area.

While the artist plan credits are enough for occasional sampling, the Studio and Pro plan is meant for producers who audition and sample loops quite liberally. The basic artist plan costs $7.99/mo or $83.88/yr. It provides powerful search filters, access to unique material that can be pitch-shifted, and post-processed downloads from Loopmasters' complete sample collection.

Loopcloud's sample management solution provides you the ability to search, examine, and drop samples into your current tracks without ever leaving your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). In addition to importing samples into your DAW, the Loopcloud software allows you to manipulate and slice them as well.

Getting Loopmaster quality samples at such low monthly rates is a steal for anyone who is serious about sample plack-based production workflows. While Splice fans might point out that Loopcloud’s prices are reflective of the lack of major producer sample packs within their collection, we feel that’s not the case.

Loopcloud, based on Loopmasters’ samples, has a bigger collection in the dub, techno, and house music scene and has ample variety to do justice to its audience for the price point it offers.

Loopcloud Free Trial

Loopcloud Studio is available for a free trial period of 30 days. During the trial period, you may use the Loopcloud Play and the Loopcloud Drum software that links to your DAW and test and keep the downloads purchased from the time of your trial. It's risk-free to cancel your membership at any time during the trial term. However, the subscription will be paid on a recurring basis (monthly or yearly) if you opt to keep it. 

Splice Sounds Plus costs $12.99 a month and includes 100 download credits, which can be used to download samples, loops, or presets from their ginormous collection. If you find that you need extra credits, you can always buy them. 200 and 500 download credits, cloud backup, access to the community, project sharing, and DAW integration are all part of Splice Creator and Creator Plus, which start at monthly subscription prices of $19.99 and $39.99.

However, note that the ad-ons are available with Splice Sounds Plus, too, just at lower downloadable credits. And Splice also has a creative rent-to-own option, allowing you to acquire premium plugins over time rather than pay for them all at once. You can also pause payments for a few months and resume, and you’re not charged interest on the price too.

Splice Free Trial

Splice gives you a chance to try out their Sounds Plus membership plan without spending a dime. For 14 days, you can check out all that Splice has to offer, including all of its sounds, loops, presets, plugins, and community tools for collaborating with other artists, which is quite a lot, when you actually try it.

The best part about it, though, is that you can continue to use the samples you downloaded during your trial and also use the cloud backup for your important projects, which saves up space. It's risk-free to cancel your membership at any time during the trial term. If you choose to continue, the subscription will be paid on a recurring basis (monthly or yearly) if you opt to keep it.

Splice Additional Costs

Splice provides access to several third-party plugins, such as the Ozone Mastering Suite, the Soundtoys 5 Bundle, and the popular instruments Serum and Massive. Many of these plugins provide a rent-to-own option, and the monthly charge ranges from $10 to $20.

Pricing Winner:

Loopcloud wins on pricing with its affordable entry-level plan at $7.99/month and an extensive 30-day free trial. It offers substantial value for cost, especially for producers in genres like dub, techno, and house music.

Both LoopCloud and Splice are widely used by modern music producers as cloud-based sample library services. They can both be used to make music in a wide variety of styles because of their extensive libraries of high-quality samples, loops and presets.

Loopcloud's Sound Library

Over 4 million samples may be found in LoopCloud's library, making it one of the largest collections of its kind. Users may quickly discover the necessary sounds thanks to the library's meticulous curation and organization.

LoopCloud also has a smart AI search engine that can locate sounds based on criteria such as tempo, key, and emotional state, which saves a lot of time and makes the process of sample-based production way more powerful. Loopcloud coming on the back of Loopmasters is a great option for dance music.

Splice's Sound Library

More than 2 million samples may be found in Splice's collection. It a smaller library than LoopCloud's, but still enough sounds to choose from across genres, including EDM, hip-hop, and pop. Splice's established artist packs are a standout feature of its collection. These bundles are the result of a cooperative effort by established musicians and sound designers, giving consumers an insider's look at the creative potential of sample libraries.

Additionally, Splice provides preset libraries for popular synthesizers like Serum and Massive, which adds more to the table than your usual cloud-based sampling.

Sounds Library Winner:

We chose Splice as the winner due to the famous producers' and artists’ packs that it contains. While it's hard to overlook Loopcloud’s massive collection with Loopmasters, Splice surely has more influential artist-packs up their sleeve.

The quality of the samples included in a sample library is of the utmost importance. While both LoopCloud and Splice have high-quality samples, the samples themselves vary in terms of sound quality.

Loopcloud Sample Quality

LoopCloud's extensive library of high-quality samples spans a wide range of musical styles. All of the samples in LoopCloud have been modified and normalized to a value of -1dB, so there will be no abrupt changes in volume. To further ensure the consistency of high quality, many LoopCloud samples are professionally recorded and mastered.

Splice Sample Quality

Splice also has a large library of samples, all of which are of high quality. Splice, like LoopCloud, offers normalized samples that were captured and processed using top-notch gear.

Sample Quality Winner: Tie

LoopCloud and Splice are equally competitive in terms of sample quality. Both sites include professionally edited, normalized, and recorded samples of the highest quality and its hard to separate the two.

Both systems offer modern and powerful sample searching interfaces, but Splice's interface seems to be more natural to use. Loopcloud’s interface, though comprehensive, can be considered complicated for an average user.

Splice Interface

Splice's UI is contemporary and stylish, making it a pleasure to use. The site is well-structured, making it simple to locate relevant samples. The search feature is fantastic, enabling you to narrow your results by a wide variety of criteria.

Loopcloud Interface

Loopcloud’s UI is way more complex due to the addition of the sample editor. There are multiple windows across the screen. While being comprehensive, it's also quite confusing for a beginner, as it's almost like learning a new DAW from scratch.

Loopcloud Sample Editor

However, it's the sample editor that makes LoopCloud stand apart from the crowd. This feature eliminates the need to export samples to a third-party editor, allowing for revisions to be made inside the platform itself. You may change the beginning and ending locations of a sample, alter its pitch and speed, and apply effects like reverb and delay using the editor. This becomes a game-changer, especially when you’re unsure of whether or not you wanna spend your credits on a particular sample. Rather than guessing your way through it, you can just chop it up, add reverb and delay and test it on top of your track to get a better idea.

Interface Winner:

Splice is more convenient as Loopcloud’s interface has a bit of a learning curve which casual users or users without prior production experience might find a bit confusing. However, if you want all the features and benefits of a sample editor-based interface, then Loopcloud is the best one for you.

Loopcloud Plugins

Beyond its sample collection and subscription plans, LoopCloud has a variety of add-ons that enhance your sample-based production workflow. LoopCloud provides sample editing and creative sampling-based plugins that connect to your DAW and give you access to their sample libraries. LoopCloud’s plugins work with several popular DAWs, including Ableton Live, Logic Pro, and FL Studio.

Loopcloud Play

The free Loopcloud Play plugin integrates with your DAW, allowing you to work with and preview Loopcloud samples without leaving your DAW. Samples may be manipulated in real-time using Play's pitch shift, time stretch, and slicing features, then used as musical building blocks.

Loopcloud Drum

Loopcloud Drum is a sample-based drum machine that lets you build custom drum kits using sounds from the Loopmasters' collection or your own sound libraries. It has a sequencer, mixer, and effects already installed. To interact with and examine Loopcloud samples without leaving your DAW, you can download the free Loopcloud Play plugin. Play's real-time pitch shift, time stretch, and slicing functions allow for the manipulation of samples to be utilized as musical building blocks.

While most DAWs already have drum pads, step sequencers, and drum machines, the Loopcloud Drum helps you create unique drum kits from samples from the Loopmasters' library or your own sound libraries. It comes preloaded with a sequencer, mixer, and effects, which is a great addition to have.

Splice Plugins

Splice users may buy plugins outright, or rent them via Splice's Rent-to-Own program. When renting the user can use the plugin, but doesn't become the legal owner  of it until a certain number of payments (often 12) have been made. Musicians and producers working with little funds may benefit greatly from this arrangement, as their payments are interest-free. What’s even better about this plan is that you can pause your payment for a few months and get back to paying them if you want. This allows the leverage to own the plugins at your own pace, without getting overtly stressed about fixed monthly payments.

Splice basically provides access to several third-party plugins, such as the Ozone Mastering Suite, the Soundtoys 5 Bundle, and popular virtual instruments like Serum and Massive. Most of these plugins provide a rent-to-own option, and the monthly payments range from $10 to $20.

Overall, the Rent-to-Own program on Splice is a great method for artists and producers to get their hands on professional plugins without breaking the bank.

Plugins Winner:

Splice rent-to-own plan tips it in its favor. It's too lucrative and innovative and worth checking out if your favorite plugin happens to be on their plugin list.

Budding producers and musicians from all over the world can be found on Splice, where they share their music together. So the sense of community and feedback is quite strong on Splice. Splice also offers cloud storage for your projects, so you can get to your saved projects from any computer without necessarily having to carry your hard disk around.

Loopcloud DAW Integration

A Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW) is the core software used when composing, producing, recording, mixing and editing audio. If you haven't settled on which DAW to use either, we have an article located here comparing those two leading options as well.

The Loopcloud plugin, downloadable for free on the website, allows for seamless integration with your favorite DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). The plugin works with a wide variety of popular digital audio workstations (DAWs). Once the LoopCloud plugin has been installed, users may browse the library, listen to previews, and download samples without ever leaving their DAW. With this addition, producers may search for and use samples in their projects without leaving their DAW.

The LoopCloud plugin also includes several other helpful capabilities, such as auto-detection of a sample's key and tempo, allowing you to align it with the tempo of your project easily. Users can preview numerous samples at once and add the ones they like using the plugin's drag-and-drop interface. In a way, this also saves you from wasting your credits on samples that might not exactly suit your current project.

LoopCloud AI Technology

The latest version of LoopCloud, which is LoopCloud 6, uses artificial intelligence in a number of ways to improve the service for its users. To begin with, LoopCloud 6 employs artificial intelligence to fuel its search function, facilitating faster and more accurate sample discovery. It basically uses AI to find tracks that are similar despite having different names or tags. If you look for a specific sound on LoopCloud, the service will also recommend other similar samples that might be a good fit for your track.

LoopCloud 6 uses artificial intelligence for both the search and automatic tagging of audio files. With "LoopCloud Play," users can upload their own audio files to the service and have AI create tags for them based on the audio's properties. This eliminates the need for users to spend time manually marking their samples and guarantees that they will be marked correctly.

The "Artificially Intelligent Drum Machine" in LoopCloud 6 is another application of AI technology. You basically need to only hum or beatbox into the microphone to generate drum beats. Then, LoopCloud's AI technology will interpret the audio and generate a drum pattern that may be further customized in-app.

Splice Established Artist Packs

Deadmau5, KSHMR, and A-Trak are just some of the well-known producers who have contributed their sample packs on Splice. Each artist or producer has carefully curated a collection of samples and loops to express their unique style in each pack.

Incorporating the styles and sounds of well-known musicians into one's own productions is made much easier with the help of these packs. Newer producers who are still finding their own sound and looking for inspiration may find them especially useful.

Splice Presets

Using preset libraries for your synth or plugin of choice can be an excellent method to both save time and spark creative ideas. Preset libraries for prominent plugins like Serum, Massive, Sylenth, and more are available on Splice, which makes it quite convenient when opting for the rent-to-own scheme.

There are hundreds of presets in each library that are ready to be used within each plugin. Professional sound designers have crafted these presets, which make them readily available for use in your project without you having to craft sounds from scratch. The preset packs are quite cool and mainly circulate between various sub-genres of electronic dance music to hip-hop to ambient and experimental music.

Splice provides a variety of plugin preset libraries, as well as bundles of preset libraries, at a reduced price. For instance, the "Ultimate Serum Bundle" provides access to 15 Serum preset libraries at a saving compared to buying them alone.

Splice Community

The Splice community acts as a gathering place for music producers, sound designers, and musicians to interact with one another, share their work, and collaborate. It provides users with a platform where they may promote their music, interact with one another by providing comments, and find fresh talent. The community part of Splice both promotes and gives possibilities for artists to cooperate on projects by networking and working together on shared endeavors.

Splice is available for both Mac and Windows computers, so you could basically work with anyone across the globe, irrespective of which OS they’re using.

Splice Cloud Storage

You will easily be able to share project files with other people who are working on the project, giving them the ability to contribute to it or make changes. This automated approach removes the need for any manual file transfers to take place and guarantees that all the musicians who are contributing to the project have access to the most recent version of the files at all times.

In addition, the cloud storage comes equipped with version control, which allows you to view older versions of the project files you've saved and even revert back to them if you’ve gone down the wrong lane while producing. As it prevents unintentional modifications or deletions, this function gives you a sense of security and peace of mind while having so many moving parts at play, including different artists, different OS’s, and different time zones where changes to your project are made.

Features Winner:

Loopcloud's advanced AI technology, seamless DAW integration, and innovative search function provide a unique, comprehensive, and efficient sample management solution. Despite Splice's community and cloud storage advantages, Loopcloud's AI-driven functionalities, particularly the automatic tagging of audio files and the "Artificially Intelligent Drum Machine", are game-changing tools that enhance the user's creative process.

Overall, both LoopCloud and Splice are highly useful sample libraries, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, and both support the top royalty free sample packs that we recommend. While Splice’s artist packs and rent-to-own might be perfect for many users, Loopcloud’s multi-layer sample editor with DAW integration is probably all that most will need from a sample-based service provider. 

So, Which Should You Buy?

This choice largely depends on your individual needs as a music producer. While Splice boasts a sleeker design and intuitive search bar, these factors alone may not tip the scale in its favor. Your decision should hinge primarily on the features you most desire in a cloud-based sample library. While the additional perks each service offers are significant, it's crucial to ascertain your core needs before making a selection.

We highly recommend taking advantage of the free trials offered by both. You can find Splice's free trial by clicking here, and LoopCloud's by clicking here. This will allow you to experience firsthand which platform best accommodates your workflow and creative process.

If you're still deciding on the perfect Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to accompany your sample library, be sure to read our comparison of the top two contenders: Ableton Live Vs FL Studio. We also have extensive reviews of the leading music distributors, the the top 10 guitars, best basses of all time, drums, and an array of financially lucrative marketing, social media and career guidance content tailored specifically for the needs of fellow musicians.

And if you have a music question you can't find an answer for, our AI driven search feature can literally answer ANYTHING. Or contact us for a more personal response.