Splice vs Loopcloud vs Tracklib: comparing the sample subscription services

Two of these three are the same product at different prices. Splice and Loopcloud both rent you a catalogue of royalty-free loops, one-shots and presets, and you pick between them on price and currency. Tracklib rents you commercially released records, split into stems, with the legal clearance to sample them included. It gets shelved next to the other two and it answers a different question, so work out which of those two things you want before you compare any prices at all.

Splice is a New York company founded in 2013, with a catalogue of over 3 million royalty-free sounds. Loopcloud is run by Loopmasters, the UK sample retailer, and lists over 5 million sounds on every one of its plans. Tracklib was founded in Stockholm in 2014, opened to the public in April 2018 after an invite-only beta, and took a $4.5 million investment from Sony Innovation Fund in June 2020. Its catalogue is more than 100,000 released songs and multi-tracks.

The three at a glance

Splice and Loopcloud do the same job

Both run on a monthly allowance you spend on individual sounds. Splice calls them credits, Loopcloud calls them points, and in practice one sample costs one unit on either service, with MIDI files and presets costing more. Unused allowance rolls over on both while your subscription is running. Neither one charges you anything beyond the subscription when you release a track, because everything in both catalogues is royalty-free.

Loopcloud's three tiers are Artist at £5.99 a month for 100 points and 5GB of cloud storage, Studio at £9.99 for 300 points and 50GB, and Professional at £17.99 for 600 points and 250GB. All three include the same software: the Loopcloud Sync and Sounds plugins, plus the DRUM and PLAY instruments. The storage matters more than it sounds, because it holds your downloaded sounds across more than one computer instead of leaving them on whichever laptop you were using that week.

Splice's three tiers are Sounds+ at $12.99 a month for 100 credits, Creator at $19.99 for 200, and Creator+ at $39.99 for 500. Every tier carries the same features, so the only thing you're choosing is how many sounds you'll download. We've gone through the credit system, the Rent-to-Own plugin scheme and the cancellation rules in detail in our Splice review.

For a UK producer the currency is a real difference rather than a footnote. Loopcloud charges £5.99 and takes £5.99. Splice charges $12.99 and your bank decides what that costs you this month, sometimes with a non-sterling transaction fee on top. At the entry tier Loopcloud is comfortably the cheaper of the two for the same 100 sounds a month.

Tracklib sells records, not loops

Tracklib licenses real commercial recordings, released anywhere between 1928 and today, and hands you the multi-track stems where they exist. You are digging through actual records for a horn line or a drum break, the way producers did with vinyl, except the rights holder has already agreed to let you sample it. Its advisory board is a list of people who built careers on that method, including Prince Paul, Erick Sermon, Zaytoven and Scott Storch.

The clearance is the whole reason the service exists. Sampling a record normally means tracking down the master and publishing owners, negotiating with both, and paying an upfront fee before you know whether the track will earn anything back. Tracklib does that in advance across its catalogue. It used to charge an upfront clearance fee on top of the subscription, as low as $50 per licence, and has since removed that fee entirely on the Premium and Max plans. The cheaper Lite plan doesn't include it.

What you pay instead is a share of the income if the track earns. Tracklib puts the split at roughly 10 to 20 per cent, scaled to how much of the original record you've used, and one licence covers up to 60 seconds of a given song across all its stems. Release nothing and you owe nothing. That structure is the opposite way round from traditional clearance, which wants money from you before a single stream happens.

Records cleared this way have gone a long way. J. Cole's "Middle Child" is the most-cited example, and Wikipedia's page on the company also lists DJ Khaled, Lil Wayne, Nas, Mary J. Blige and BROCKHAMPTON among artists who have released Tracklib-sampled tracks. Attack Magazine's review of the service called it a record store for sampling, which is a fair description of what browsing it feels like.

Tracklib also sells Sounds, a separate library of royalty-free packs, loops, one-shots and FX that need no clearance at all. That part of it competes directly with Splice and Loopcloud, though on a much smaller catalogue, so it works better as a bonus than as a reason to subscribe.

Paying by the year

Loopcloud's annual plans are £59.99 for Artist with 1,200 points, £99.99 for Studio with 3,600, and £179.99 for Professional with 7,200. Artist annual works out at £12 less than twelve monthly payments and drops the full year's points into your account on day one, which suits anyone who wants to download a lot of sounds in one sitting rather than 100 a month. Splice runs an annual Creator plan and discounts it periodically; its own special-offer page was advertising 12 months of Creator for $120 when we checked in August 2026, so it's worth looking for a promotion before paying monthly.

What happens to your sounds and credits if you stop paying

• Splice: every sound you've downloaded stays yours, and unused credits expire 28 days after your last billing date. You can pause a plan for up to two months without losing accrued credits.
• Loopcloud: downloaded sounds are yours permanently, and unspent points are frozen for 180 days rather than deleted, according to Loopmasters' help centre. Come back inside that window and they're returned to your account.
• Tracklib: a licence you've already taken out covers that release, so cancelling doesn't unwind a clearance you've registered. The revenue share continues for as long as the track earns.
• All three: nothing you've already put in a finished track stops being legal because you cancelled a subscription.

Which one to actually pick

• Loopcloud if you want loops and one-shots at the lowest monthly cost in pounds, or you work across two machines and want the cloud storage.
• Splice if you want the largest well-known catalogue, the Rent-to-Own plugin scheme, or the packs from producers who release there first.
• Tracklib if the sound you're chasing is a real record rather than a purpose-built loop, and you'd rather pay a share of future income than a fee upfront.
• None of them yet if you're new and still working out your genre. Your DAW's bundled content and the free tools in our free VST plugins guide cost nothing and won't sit unused while you decide.

Plenty of producers end up on two of the three, usually a loop subscription for drums and textures and Tracklib for the one record they want to build a track around. There's no rule against it, though paying for both while you're still finishing one track a month is how subscriptions quietly become the most expensive part of a home studio.