Roy Rosenberg
Saxophonist Co-founder, Riffloop
Chiang Mai, Thailand
I play saxophone. Most of what I know about music I got the slow way — putting a record on, finding one line inside it, and playing that line back until it was mine.
I co-founded Riffloop because that process never got any easier, and it should have. It is the tool I wanted for all the years I spent rewinding the same four bars.
- ATM Trio — featured saxophone
- Moment's Notice — Chiang Mai
- Chiang Mai Street Jazz Festival — 3 December 2025
- Writes on the Riffloop blog
Why I built Riffloop
Every transcription starts the same way: you need to hear one thing on its own. The bassline under the horns. The inner voice in the piano. The line you are trying to steal. Before you can work it out, you have to get it away from everything else in the mix.
Riffloop does that part. It splits a song into its separate parts so you can pull one forward, loop four bars of it, slow it down without it going seasick, and change the key if the horn is in the wrong one. It reads the chords, the key and the tempo off the recording while it's at it.
There are two ways in: a Chrome extension that works on the YouTube video you're already watching, and a Studio in the browser where you bring your own file, a YouTube link or a SoundCloud link.