Loop region is sometimes looping imperfectly

Hi,

I’m encountering a very strange problem when trying to create seamless loops. This video shows the gist of it: https://youtu.be/T7AmTOa4XJ8

I’ve got an imperfectly looped torch SFX track (.wav file). What I’m trying to with it is this: split it down the middle into two separate tracks, overlap the beginning of one part with the end of another (therefore creating a smooth transition), add a “Loop Region” over them, and I’m expecting to get one seamless loop from the whole thing. But that isn’t what happens.

If I simply split the track, then switch their positions around in the timeline, the “Loop region” option works as expected, there’s no popping when moving from the ending of one track to the beginning of another. However, if I then overlap the two tracks in the middle of the loop and play it again, there’s a very audible switch at the end of the loop (even though nothing has changed as far as that part of the loop is concerned).

Why is this happening? Is there any way to avoid it?

Thanks.

I’ve also noticed that FMOD can sometimes introduce audible and inconsistent anomalies when there’s a fade involved anywhere on the instrument, probably due to some processing latency. If you really push it you can hear it — for example, if you shorten that instrument and loop to 100ms long and put a fade in and out on it, you’ll hear a different sound each time it loops. This is obviously an absurd use case but it sounds like FMOD code is doing its best to process these fades while keeping it efficient.

Whatever the issue is, the best practice for making a loop is to do exactly what you’re doing at design time in your DAW.

This seems to be a bug, thanks for letting us know. I have passed this onto the Dev team to investigate.
In the meantime, I have found that splitting the instrument at the start of the loop at an arbitrary point results in seamless looping:


Please give that workaround a go and let me know if you run into any other issues.

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Hey magomusica,

Yeah, the processing angle makes sense. In that case, I’ll try to avoid fade effects on instruments that require precise transitions in the future. Thanks for the insight.

That being said, if you can see the response that jeff_fmod posted on this thread, there’s a nifty workaround around the problem - as long as you’ve got at least one part of the instrument without any fades, you can just split it at that point and that makes it behave accurately (at least as far as loops are concerned).

Hey jeff_mod,

The splitting method did the trick, thanks!

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