Hello. I made a few sounds for a game I am well happy with, now what I want to do is split it into sections so I have start (initial impact), middle (can be "held"/ sample continuously playing as long as needed, ie 1 seconds, or 3 seconds, or 4, whatever is happening in the game) and end (the release bit of the sound effect). Is there a VST plugin or any software tool, which makes it easy to load an audio sample, and select a certain middle part of that sample to "hold" or "loop " ? Or do you have any techniques for this kind of thing you would give a try? Cheers

Hey,

To make looping points I usually use Sound Forge. Not the greatest, but it can definitely get the job done with regards to looping samples. Another good program (which I believe is Mac-based only) is Peak Pro. The basic idea is that you want to try to make the looping points:

A) Appear at zero-crossings on both ends.

B) Have the waveform shape and velocity at each loop point be similar. Trying to make a looping point where the shape and velocity of the waveform differs too greatly can create bumps, wobbles or even clicks and clips when the loop occurs.

Once you've made a decent beginning sample (streaming), middle sample (looping) and tail sample (streaming) then it's up to how the game's audio engine is constructed.

There isn't a VST or plug-in that will magically do this for you (at least not that I know of). All of the ones I've worked with require that you get into the sample and tweak things yourself.

Thanks,

Nathan

Hey, thanks as always Nathan heh.

That helps. Shame there is no magic wand tool for this but I own SF so I will get stuck into it with that.

If it's anything like the other tools I've used it might have a 'snap to zero-crossing' feature when you select the part to loop. All you have to do then is find the pair of zero crossings that suits you best.

Having said that, any two points where the wave amplitude match and where the wave form is similar will serve equally well.

And if all else fails, applying a cross-fade can sometimes manage to smooth over the cracks.