At the moment, I’m quite convinced that the best workflow (at least for me) with audio segments that need to seamlessly loop or transition somewhere else is by including a reverb tail at the end of the audio assets, and let it play in the transition timeline. Though it is possible to achieve great transitions from or towards the middle of an instrument using FMOD’s transition timelines, depending of the musical content it’s not always perfect. Blending the reverb tail of the source instrument to the beginning of the destination instrument always makes a theoretically perfect transition, in every case. And creating an asset with a reverb tail is easier to achieve (especially in Reaper) and more polyvalent than baking a seamless loop in the DAW.
BUT. I found something, which I first thought was a bug, which I now think is a “feature”, that goes against this workflow. An illustration of what I’m talking about would be something like:
with something like that inside the transition timeline:
In that case, when playing the transition “to A”, instead of playing my reverb tail, it plays… the beginning of the loop! I sure understand that this behavior can have its interest, when using a baked seamless loop, so there will always be something to “feed” into the transition timeline, without having to manually repeat the instrument. However, things becomes weirder when using transition timelines both in the transition and in the loop (which is what I want) ; in that case, the loop still plays instead of the reverb tail BUT without its own transition timeline, which maybe is a technical limitation (impossible to play a transition timeline inside another transition timeline?) but makes no sense conceptually (if a loop has been set with a transition timeline, there’s no point in playing it without).
Could you confirm I’m correct about my assumptions on this behavior?
In fact, to use my reverb tail workflow, I had to remove every loop and replace them with transitions. That’s not a big deal at all, but it’s a bit of a pity FMOD doesn’t handles by default what I assume to be a great workflow.
Here’s the demo of the track where I used this technique, to loop or transition somewhere (without any loop region, as said):
