How to cut a seamless loop out of a track?

Making a loop of a particular section is one of the first ideas that comes to mind for any DJ or music producer when inspecting a track to use as material. Nevertheless, neither software (DJ-mix or DAW) includes as of today a dedicated feature. Thus gatekeeping this ability to musically-gifted hands or following a quite tedious workflow on a third-party audio editor. So, is there any way to easily and seamlessly loop audio?

It’s all about manual work… with diverse results

Looping remains still a big deal when it comes to sampling or simply extending a track, all the more so on-the-go during a DJ-mix.

First you’ll need to isolate a perfect loop, which will play back seamlessly. Otherwise additional tedious adjustments will be needed to make it sound seamless (see below). In electronic music identifying a perfect loop may be facilitated by the repetitive measures, just looking at the kick position in the waveform. But the user could be left blind in case of heavy-loaded waveforms. As any other musical genres or non-musical audio (ambience background for a video game for example) is concerned, there will be no easy way to identify manually a perfect loop. Then you’ll have to cautiously select the in and out points, with the help of the measure-based grid of your DAW.

If you want to loop a section which is not a perfect loop, how to make the loop points unnoticeable? Well it involves manual steps (”simply” crossfading the tail in the best case, fading in and out around the tail, creating your own tail in the worst scenario).

What if an algorithm could take care of?

As for the first step above, solutions to automatically detect good loop points exist. As long as the user is capable of properly setting it up though. Just look at Wavelab (an audio editor and recording software) dedicated procedure only to find out that it is far from straightforward and requires fine-tuning.

At Ircam amplify we tailored an algorithm to this very specific task: identify all the perfect loops out of a track. Once done, it is able to complete the job by creating an audio file for each of the loops. With our Loop Extractor algorithm, all the manual steps are automated, leaving no room for mistakes. The perfect loops contained in the track are identified and cut, ready to be played back seamlessly, dramatically enhancing the user experience.

No steps to follow, no editing, here you go. All the user will have to do is listen to all the perfect loops extracted to choose the one best suited to the idea he had in mind. Cherry on the cake: among all the loops at his disposal he might even discover some hidden gems, loops he could never have found on his own, that will propel his projects to new heights.

💡 How does it work?

1) Upload the original audio.
2) Get instantly as many audio files as perfect loops, in one package

How to implement in your software?

Wouldn’t it be nice if this magic wand for perfect loops was integrated into the tools of these everyday producers?

👉Simply sign up and follow the API doc to process the tracks