exporting a perfect loop

hi all

i was curious if anyone had any tips on exporting a perfect loop.

basically i have an 8 bar song that i need to give to someone so they can just play it on loop. in sonar if i just select the 8 bars end to end and turn on loop, it plays seamlessly perfect. export it to a wav and there is an audible transition between the end of the file and the beginning, like a skip, when played in pretty much any music playing software (from windows media player up to professional stuff like wavelab). now perhaps once they take the file and use it where they're gonna use it (in this case its background music for an iphone app) it will loop perfectly, but it worries me that it doesn't loop perfectly for me when i play it outside of sonar.

any thoughts on what i might be doing wrong?

thanks!

Dave

hey thanks for the response. this would be midi including multiple tracks, exporting it all to audio. you know while i did check all the last and first notes to make sure they're all starting at 000 in the beginning and ending by 000 at the end, i didn't actually check the clip properties. when i get home i'll check that out and see if it makes a difference.

thanks again. i'll reply later with my results.

yea i usually highlight all the tracks, make sure i'm exactly from 1:1:000 to the 000 of the last bar and then export the whole thing (saving the time of bouncing to one track and then exporting)... but i can try that too for the times when i need something to export as a perfectly loopable track.

still. i even tried bouncing it all to a track first before exporting which really just produced the exact same file i think since it was the same exact length and the same everything else.

this particular song is just 3 tracks. tracks 1 and 3 are exact to the bar, track 2 is a little bit shorter, but i even tried both leaving it like that and extending the clip to the end of the bar just in case that made a difference.

i'm really starting to think that it's just windows media player that can't seem to play a seamless loop. wavelab is "almost" perfect now. it doesn't have the skip but it's not 100% exact. hopefully when the guy plugs it into his iphone app it will work like it works in sonar. if not i'll probably update this post with more questions :-)

thanks guitarhacker but i know how to do that. do that every day :-) as a matter of fact when doing that it loops perfect.

my problem is exporting that to a .wav file and then playing the wav back on loop in any program, there's an audible skip when it starts again at the beginning of the file. i need to export a .wav file to give a developer so they can set it to loop in the background while on a menu screen on their iphone app and we'd like for it to loop seamlessly. i'll know over the weekend whether it worked as is and like i said maybe windows media player is just the problem.

thanks

I see what you're saying now..... hummmmm... IDK.... never though of how to solve THAT problem....

I never use Windows Media Player so I thought I'd play with a bit. I opened an 8 bar bass guitar groove clip (44.1 kHz stereo wave file) in WMP, put it on Repeat and recorded it playing in Sonar several times. In Sonar I matched up the tempo to the clip and then, in a different audio track, inserted the same bass groove clip. When I play the project both clips play at exactly the same time and there is no lag, or delay, between loops on the clip played in WMP. Both sound exactly the same and there is no noticeable glitch between loops in WMP. They play perfectly together, and sound the same, at the first measure and at the tenth measure.

I played some different audio loops in WMP and, also, there was no problem with the looping and they played seamlessly when repeating. Are you using the latest version of WMP? I don't know why they would loop perfectly for me and not for you. What sample rate are you exporting them to?

I would just apply groove clip looping and loop it in project and export that

I was having a similar problem when exporting Mp3s.  As soon as I switch to the same settings as the project (48k, 24bit), the timing lined up just like it was supposed to.