Although I've been making music as the trance artist "Imphenzia" for 14 years, which is starting to sound like a very long time also making me sound old, I've only been releasing music for games during the past 3-4 years as "Imphenzia Soundtrack." I mention this for no apparent reason at all, so lets move on.
I've created a video tutorial of how I go about when creating a seamless loop. In this case it's an orchestral movie-style piece of music that will be added to my library of non-exclusive music. I use Steinberg Cubase 5.5 and Sony Sound Forge 10 to create the loop but you will probably be able to replicate the steps in your sequencer and audio editor of choice.
Time for the tutorial - have a look at it and don't forget to watch it in 720p so you can read the options better.
I hope the tutorial helps you to create perfect seamless loops of your music. Some of the important things to stress are:
- Repeat the music you want to loop three times in your sequencer, exactly 3 times down to the measure. Why? It's because you want to ensure a good loop including any trailing audio at the end of the music piece, it could be decay, reverb trails, and echo.
- Export the audio to a Wav file (or a format of choice) and load it into a good sound editor.
- Crop out the center third of the music, use sample precision to do this.
- Remove any clicks by ensuring that the audio file starts and stops on 0 dB exactly (or infinitely low as Sound Forge describes it.) This is performed by fading in the start and fading out the end by only a few samples, 20-100 samples is usually suitable.
In the video tutorial I also mention a Javascript that I've created for Sound Forge that will perform the selection of the center third, cropping, and fading the ends to ensure a good loop point. This particular Javascript will be the topic of my next blog post so do come back soon.
