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

This is an audio clip you are looping? Or Midi?

First make sure the loop's properties (Right Click the clip, select Clip Properties) show it as being a full 8 bars in Length in the General Tab and has the right number of beats (32) in the Audio Stretching tab. Basic stuff, I know.... but we have to rule things out.

The loop button in Sonar is looping a portion of the time-line, and is independent of the clip's duration.

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.

While I'm no expert on the subject, if it were me I would bounce everything to one audio track in Sonar, make sure that clip was the right length and then export that as audio. It might not make any difference but I like to SEE what I'm exporting.

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.

Just be sure that the length is 9:01:000 as shown in the image I posted. That ensures that the beginning of a looped clip starts exactly where the previous clip ends and is a full 8 measures.

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 :-)

set the snap to grid to MEASURES.... highlight the 8 bars and select COPY.... then paste it to measure 9 and in the paste property box simply choose the number of times to paste.

It will paste the first 8 measures seamlessly just like you had the loop function turned on. you can export this as a wave.

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

Is the size of the file a big factor? What Guitarhacker suggests sounds like a good idea. Loop the clip in Sonar several times and then export that. Instead of a very short clip that has a glitch in it every time it loops several times, you'll have a longer clip that repeats the loop several times with no glitches.