 When working with sound effects for video games, it's often needed to make a sound loop seamlessly so that it can play on repeat and feel like a continuous sound even though it's actually a short part that's just repeating over and over. In this video, I'm going to show you how to seamlessly loop sound effects and I'm going to do this using two popular open source audio production programs. Let's go! Hey! I'm Anfa. In this video, we're going to loop sound effects seamlessly using Audacity and Ardor. Audacity is a free and open source audio editor while Ardor is a free and open source DAW or Digital Audio Workstation. They are very different but you can achieve very similar results using both of them. And since I use both, I would like to show you how we can achieve the same results with both and you can also decide which one is better for what purpose. Alright. I've prepared seven example sounds which are going to be very easy, slightly harder, harder and then quite difficult to loop properly. And we're going to loop them all and I'm going to show you how that is done. I've prepared seven audio files that we're going to loop seamlessly, first using Audacity then using Ardor. So you'll be able to compare how the two programs stack up and which one does the job better. Alright. So here's my seven files. I'm going to drag in the first one and we'll have a listen. Alright. It goes and goes like that. Okay. So in order to loop this sound, everything we really need to do is just trim this sound so that the start and the end of our loop are in a quiet part where there's only background noise present. So this is one, this is really the easiest case imaginable. So I'm going to just maybe first zoom in a little bit so we can see more of the waveform and you can see in here we have quiet, a quiet part. I'm going to play it. Yeah. There's only noise here and let's see what's here. Also only noise in here. So I'm going to select this part here and now an important thing is to press the Z key. What Z does, I'm going to zoom in and show you what Z does is it's going to snap the edges of our selection to the closest zero crossing. So let me move this to random place and now if I hit Z, you see it's going to, it's, audacity has moved this edge of the selection back so that it's in a place where both channels, hopefully both sometimes it's just one, are as close to zero as possible. This is important because if we would cut our sound in here or here, you can see that we would cut on a non-zero sample value and that would create an audible click. In some cases this is not problematic but I think in this sound it could be audible. So let's hit Z, again make sure our selection is on the zero crossing and now all we really need to do is hit Ctrl T or trim. I'm going to reset the zoom and now what we can do is press Ctrl C, right arrow and Ctrl V to copy and paste this region face to head to tail. And now we can just play through this repeat point and see if we can hear that it's there. Alrighty and that's a seamless loop. So that's done. Let's double click, delete our copy and now I'm just going to save five. Export selected audio and let's call this zero one. I'm going to save in 24-bit FLAC. Okay, so that's the first exercise done. I'm going to close this and move on to the second one. Let's have a listen. This is the inside of my fridge. Alright, so what we want to do is have a nice loop of this fridge ambience from the inside. I'm going to also zoom in to see it a bit better. And now we need to find two spots where the sound is identical. I think this is pretty close. Let's create a range selection and then if I click on the ruler, alright, we could make the loop longer. Alright, I think even here it's still good. Alright, let's hit Z again to make sure our selection is on the zero crossings. And you can see that in here, Audacity didn't manage to find a completely perfect place. And we can try and nudge this. Oh, here could be a better one. Hit Z again. And this is going to be better. So it's a good idea to investigate your start and end point or in and out point. And again, the same here, Audacity found a zero crossing, but only on one channel. And we need to have both left and right channels to be on zero. Oh, I have, oh, whoa, I've lost my selection. Control shift to Z. Yeah. Alright, I need to select it again. Unfortunately, undo. Yeah, I don't think there is an undo for selection. Oh, I should have recorded that. Alright, I'm going to move this a little bit here. Okay, hit Z again. I'm going to zoom in and seek for a zero crossing. This seems nice. Let's check out the other, the out point. And this ain't so good. I am going to try and find a better one. So click and drag, hit Z again. Oh, oh, that's not a zero crossing. Excuse me. How the, how does it say that's a zero crossing? Okay, I think, I think this is pretty much perfect. Right. So again, let's trim this, control T. Now, control C, right arrow to move our cursor to the right of the selection. Control V to paste. Again, we can, of course, repeat this. So we have three copies, but there's no need. Let's play and see if this actually loops. Alright, there is a slight difference in timbre of the fridge tone, but I think it's, it's so small that we could say that it's, you know, well, yeah. Let's call that a day and can also see that this is a pretty quiet sound, but we'll leave it like that. I'm not going to normalize it. That's like a different thing. Let's export the second loop. And there it is. Nice. Now let's import another file. And this one is going to be more difficult. As I said, we're ramping up difficulty with each example. So let's have a listen. Oh, this one is going to be loud compared to the others. Okay, so this is a vocal tone, a note, a song note. So far, we've been dealing with noises. There wasn't any cycles, any repetition, any like patterns we need to match. We just had to find places where it, where the start and the end of the loop sounded identical here. We also need to maintain the sequence of the oscillation. So we can see we have a one cycle here, another cycle here. So we will need to cut on these cycles. And of course, we need to find parts where the voice sounds identical so that the start and the end transition doesn't sound jarring. Let's try this. What you can do to quickly try out a few things is to just copy a part. However, we will lose our precious, precious selection. So what you can also do is create a label track. And that label track is going to let us save our selection. I'm going to call this one. One and enter. And now we can just hit this and we'll have this part selected. Let's unselect this with control, copy, paste, paste. And we'll like, this is a very rough loop, but we're just see if the end and start sound similar. OK, this part sounds more nasal. Maybe we need to delete something from the front. Let's try again. So I've just shortened my first loop and I'm testing it again. All right, again, nasally. I'm going to shorten this. And wait, wait, did I cut it right? Oh, I did not. You see, I missed some parts, so that would be bad. Oh, OK, if you click on the line between two regions, like I did, you're going to merge them into a single region. I don't like that. For here, I want them to be separate. All right, it looks like it's still not. Let's try this. We may need to make a very short loop because, believe it or not, it's really difficult to sing a note like a synthesizer, that is, with no variation. OK, I think this will work. So I have this little loop I've taken. I'm going to now delete this part so that we start on the rising oscillation and go to the end and delete everything up to this sample here. So we end right before that cycle. So now if I copy and paste, let's zoom in. And this looks like it's a perfect expansion, extension of extrapolation of that. Let's see. All right, that's pretty cool, pretty quick. So I'm going to just select this, paste it a couple of times so we can listen. All right, I would say this loops, and that's our loop. So I'm going to undo copying and pasting this. Oh, and might this sound quieter. So I'm going to reset this to zero before exporting because if I leave this fader at a negative, at a different value than zero, the exported file will have altered volume. You may notice that this was a mono file, by the way. We didn't have to deal with two channels, just one, which sometimes is easier. Sometimes it doesn't matter that much. OK, let's go with example number four. And example four is going to be a little bit like example two. What I want to do is have a loop of this water stream coming from the sink. But you may notice that it sounds different at every part. So there is no way we're going to be able to just trim our way out of this. And this is where we need to introduce a new technique. And that is a crossfade. So what I'm going to do is select the part which I want to make a loop out of. I'm going to hit Z again to make our cuts hopefully on the zero crossings. I'm going to trim this file. So I'm going to hit Control T. And now we want this edge to be seamlessly transitioning to this edge, or rather this edge to be transitioning seamlessly to this edge. So we're going to make a crossfade. But how do we do it? We need to somehow overlay this on top of this. So how do we do it is we decide how long our crossfade is. Then we're going to cut a part of our sound. I have hit Control I, which is inserting a split. Now these are two regions, separate regions. We can move them. And now you can see this edge and this edge transition into each other seamlessly. So I can swap these around. And now this edge and this edge will transition seamlessly, which will loop perfectly. And we need to just transition somehow from this edge to this edge so that this is not sounding jarring. And how will I do it is I'm going to move this into a new track. I'm going to hit Control D because that's kind of the easiest way to do it. Now delete this. And as a free bonus, we also got these two overlaid. So our original track is here overlapping on our part, which we'll go into crossfade. And now because audacity is totally destructive, every time you do something wrong and you need to correct it, you just have to undo a bunch of times or keep copies of your tracks so we can just pick your raw material again and work on that. That's why sometimes creating these crossfades is going to require some trial and error. And I know from experience that they don't work how you'd expect. If we just create a crossfade like make this fade out, then Control select this, Control D select our track, and go effect fade in, this ain't going to work. And I'm going to just show you why. It sounds seamless, almost. But have you noticed the volume dip? Let me show this again. Watch closely the output levels as we go, and especially on the middle of the crossfade. We are losing volume in here. And there's a couple of ways we can correct that. One way is to use the volume envelope tool. You can just click, click again, and create a little bump in here, and try and make this work. All right, that's better. I just need to make another bump in here. So if I click on this outer, it's going to snap to zero, which is neutral. And if I click on this inner part, I can move it up and apply gain. So make it louder. Actually, maybe I should have done this, or maybe not, let's see, let's try it. Okay, this is good. I like that. What I'm going to do next is reset these levels to zero and zero. And now to combine these two tracks into a single one, I'm going to select this, Control, oh, Control Shift. I'm just going to click and drag. All right, now go tracks, mix, mix and render to new track, which have created a new track containing a sum of our two tracks before. Let's solo it. And you can see that this volume is very consistent throughout this track, except for this part. So we can actually use our volume envelope tool again to try and correct that a little bit. Just we need to be careful, because if we mess up on the edges of our loop, we're going to have a problem. The good thing about the volume envelope tool is that it's non-destructive. It's like the only non-destructive tool in Audacity. And it shows you the waveform immediately, which is really helpful because you can actually judge what you're doing visually. Let's try it. Okay, that's good enough. Let's now test if it loops seamlessly. I'm going to copy and paste this. And as you can see, our volume envelope is also being copied and pasted as well. Let's play through the loop transition and make sure we can't hear it. Okay, I had no idea where this transition happened. So job well done. So let me delete all that because that's how Audacity rolls. It's destructive. And let's load up example number five. Let's have a listen. Okay, this is a city ambience. And I'd like to create a long loop out of that. However, there are some problems with wind noise. Let me zoom in. You can see these low frequency bumps. This is wind doing us a disservice. We could high pass this to get rid of it. But I don't want to do this. This is not the topic of the video. So I'm just going to do a cut in and here. Yeah, let's go control I. And yeah, let's delete this. And this is what we're left with. Also, what's this? I think this is part of the recording. So I don't like this bump. I'm going to just select this, hit Z to make my selection borders snap to zero crossings, delete. Check this out. It looks good. Let's play. Sounds better. Nice. Let's loop this. Same deal as before. We need to select how long we want our crossfade to be because there is no way we're going to match the start and end of this. There's too much components. Like there's birds, there's cars, there's dogs, there's some people throwing out bottles. Too much things going on. We won't be able to match this. We need to make a crossfade. So maybe even a quite long one. So I'm going to hit control I in here to separate this part. I'm going to control D. Now delete that. So remember this edge and this edge are matching perfectly. I'm going to move this forward, move this back. Maybe do it like that. And now this is start of our loop. By the way, did I snap to zero crossing before cutting? I think I did. If not, we can correct it a little bit. Yeah, I did. And we do a crossfade. So yeah, just, we can kind of cheat and try and make it work easier without using the envelope tool to fix it afterwards. So I'm going to do fade out on this part. Then control select my first track, deselect this one, and I'm going to change the selection. And I'm going to go fade in. And hopefully this overlap that we are fading in here but fading out here is going to give us more consistent volume across the fade. Let's listen. Yep, that's really good. I have no idea. I have no idea these are two different files or two different parts of the recording. Okay, so let's, sorry. How do I, I think there are some tools for zooming but I never can figure out which one I need to use. Let's go tracks, mix, mix and render to new track. And here is our loop. I'm going to solo it, copy, right arrow, paste, right arrow, paste, I'm just going to play it. Let's see if we can hear a transition. Maybe a shorter one because this is already quite long. I'm also going to zoom in so we can see the waveforms better. It's just quite, quite quiet, perfect. No sign of looping whatsoever, this is seamless. Just like it should be perfectly seamless. All right, let's export the selection. This is loop zero five and let's load example six. And this one is going to be a difficult one and we're going to learn some new techniques to do it. Let me turn it down because it's quite a loud sound. Let's play it. Okay, you can see there is some kind of a repeating pattern in here. So we need to identify this pattern and cut out at least one copy of this pattern pattern. And unfortunately, the waveform doesn't tell us that much because there is this underlying base tone which is quite overpowering and when I look at this waveform, I don't see anything really. So let's switch the view from waveform to spectrogram. And now you can clearly see what is going on in here. We have four repetitions of a loop, two of which are incomplete and two of which are complete. And what we can do is find a common point maybe between this and this, just transition from this to this and this is our loop. So I'm going to, but you see this isn't that simple because how do we make sure that we are absolutely on point with our trimming? To do this, I'm going to duplicate this track, switch it to spectrogram as well because for some reason, duplicates don't do this. And I'm going to shift this. Maybe I'm going to even mute it. I'm going to shift this track so that we can match these features that we see on the spectrogram. Here we have some higher frequency content coming in and this looks like we are syncing it nicely. All right. Okay, so now what we can do is we can find a common point. Actually, you know what? We should shift this one iteration here. Yeah, because we wanted to cut it on this thing. All right. Okay, so let's do this. Now I'm going to switch it to waveform view because it's going to be pretty important to match these waveforms of the base tone or otherwise we're going to have some phasing issues. So I'll try and see what the pattern is. I'm trying to match these, this is the, there's a peak like that. Oh, oh, that's better. Is that a better match? Okay, I can put a selection in here. Maybe I can, hmm. It's quite difficult and also it doesn't seem to like repeat very well. Maybe this is not what I should be doing. Oh, that's probably it. Yeah, that looks more like it. Yeah, it seems matching much better. Okay, let me switch it again to spectrogram just to see. Okay, so what we want to achieve is copy, is trim from this part to this part. So I'm going to now select a common place, somewhere where the tone, there's not much movement. So it's going to be easier among all both tracks. So I've put my cursor here, I'm going to control click on my upper track and I'm going to just go control I, which inserts a cut. Now the thing is I need to transfer this cut to the same position in this cycle of the loop. And that's why I moved this in here because I can just select that, shift this back to the start so that it snaps perfectly. You can see that the end points are exactly in the same place. And now we just know where this is. So I can click and audacity will snap to this. I can just hit control I again. And this part is going to be our perfect loop. Ha, let's switch to waveform view. Before we do that, I'm going to delete this helper track already because it's done its job. And let's see and try to find a zero crossing because you can see there is no zero crossing on this part. I either forgot or yeah, I think I forgot to do that. But let's find a closest zero crossing. You know what? We don't have to do is like that. We can trim it right now. Let's go trim, control T. And now I'm going to go to the end because I saw that somewhere before is a nice zero crossing. Maybe it's going to be this here. No, maybe this, nah. All we need to do is find a nice zero crossing. It doesn't really matter where it is. It could be in the middle of that file. Wherever it is, just find a nice zero crossing. Could be better. It's difficult because the base tone is quite out of phase of everything. Okay, you know what? I think we might not find the greatest. Okay, I think this is going to be pretty good. Right, what we're going to do now is slice it here and I'm just going to cut this part and paste it in here. Now let's just shift these two together. Oh wait, they don't match. Ah, because we need to make a crossfade. A simple cut won't make it. You see, our waveforms don't really match that closely. We won't be able to get away with just a simple trim. Let's just test this. I'm going to copy, paste and listen. Yeah, okay, undo. Let's undo our way back to the start. All right, so now you see this isn't as simple as we thought, right? And I told you this is going to be a major, major challenge. But you see, what we have here, we have a nice overlap of two parts. Let's delete this one. So what do you think? We could, since this and this part are going to transition seamlessly, we can just fade this out and fade this in and we have our nice crossfade and it's done. Let's do it. Fade out, control, control. Gonna make this one shorter actually. Or even move it a little bit. Okay, effect fade in. Now I'll need to move my selection. Come on. Okay, I had to merge these two regions to be able to change my selection. And now I'm going to select this and go edit, remove special, split delete. Why split delete? If I deleted this normally, it would shift all of that to the left, breaking my sync. And the sync is pretty crucial in this thing. Okay, so now we should have a nice crossfade. Let's listen to it. Oh, I just need to unmute this one. It seems to work, but there's a little bit of a volume dip, just like we had before with the fade in, fade out. But let's not worry about it too much. What I'm going to do now is again, restore this little cut in here because we're gonna need it. So now I'm going to actually duplicate this once again, delete it from here and move it to the start. Oh, wait, but it doesn't, but wait, I'm, no, no, no, no, no, undo. Yeah, and instead of deleting that, I'm gonna control L this. So L means it's going to become silence. I think it's silence, audio, yes. All right, I'm gonna again, insert my trim point, sorry, my loop point in here. And now I'm just going to move this thing. Yeah, I need to duplicate this to be able to move it to a new track because that's the easier way, like, all right. And now, oh, I need both of these. That's what I'm doing wrong. I need to copy both of these. I'm gonna, no, no, no, no, okay. Yeah, I'm gonna select all of that, shift this to the left. And now I want to make sure these two snap. Okay, right. Whoa, whoa, whoa. So now this part shows me my loop point, right? So this plus this equals my loop. Let's do this. I'm gonna just copy that, paste it on these two tracks. I am going to tracks, mix, mix and render to new tracks. So we have our loop created in here. I think I've selected something more than I wanted. Let's undo. Let's go again, track, mix, mix and render to new track. For some reason, it doesn't wanna do what I want it to do. Whatever, we're gonna force it to work. Tracks, mix, mix and render. Okay, whatever. I'll need to delete this manually. So let's zoom right in. I'm gonna also use control mouse wheel to zoom in on that. And make sure I'm deleting only the, oh, okay. Shift home. We'll move my selection to the start, let's delete. Oh my goodness, there's so much work in Audacity to just get this going. All right, let's copy, paste and paste and listen to the transition. Okay, except for the nasty click, it is seamless. So that is good. So how do we fix the nasty click? Of course, we find a zero crossing or as good as an approximation of zero crossing as we can. Oh, by the way, my volume has changed because I've, yeah, I forgot to reset my faders before I mixed and rendered. So that's a little bit of a thing. Okay, no, no biggie. All right, now let's find a zero crossing and we can hit the Z key to try and find it with Audacity's help and we may not find one. And if we don't, we're gonna make one. So that's not a huge problem. Okay, you know what? Maybe I'm gonna go with this one. Let's copy or cut this. So I'm gonna go control X. I'm gonna go to this end, control V and paste. And now you see these should transition perfectly. But I think, oh yeah, that's the problem. I just have one tiny sample, which is zero. Gonna merge these regions. Oh, but I can't merge them because that's the whole point. All right, I have just one sample that is zero. So that's the problem. The problem is that I've been, okay, now I don't understand, what the hell? Okay, yeah, this is the problem. I delete that. Cool, now we find our zero crossing. Oh yeah, let's go with this. Shift, click here, control X. So we are almost on the zero crossing here. Select it here, control V. So we are almost on zero crossing here. I'm gonna merge this. So, and now just to make sure, I'm gonna apply a little fade out on the end of this loop and a little tiny fade in on the start of it. Let's copy, write, arrow, paste, and listen to the transition. Again, okay, again. I'd say this is okay, this is good. There's some macroscopic click. I don't know where it came from, but it shouldn't be there. Alrighty, the last thing left to do is correct our bad crossfade. So I'm going to, oh, I need to resume reset. Oh, but I'm not gonna see my levels. Let's normalize it then. Okay, we're at back to square one with the levels. I'm gonna insert a point here, insert a point here. Now I'm moving it down and up because if I move it up a little bit, it's going to snap to the neutral position. Now I can move this up a little bit. Maybe this down, I need to avoid clipping. So I don't want these peaks to go above to touch the edge, all right? And I need to avoid it on both channels. Okay, I think this looks a bit better, more equal even. Let's test it again. Okay, here is our loop. Whoa, let's export it. Maybe just reset this. So the levels are not intact. And type zero six. That is the exercise zero six done. Let's delete all of that. And now the final exercise is zero seven. This is gonna be a little bit different. Not necessarily more difficult, maybe a little bit, but different. I turn it down so it doesn't kill you. And now let's listen to it. Okay, so what we want to achieve is this section looping indefinitely. Just to make it really seamless and not what we heard right now. So let's open up the spectrogram and see what actually is going on here. And this is pretty clear now. We have these hits. And they have a steady rate. So what we need to do is we need to cut in a place where it would be a next hit. So we need some way to find where the next hit would be. And we could measure the distance between the two, see how long it is, shift the selection, try and blah, blah, no, just duplicate this track. And I'm gonna actually switch back to waveform because as you can see the high frequency content is pretty telling of where the hit takes place. So what I'm going to do is just shift this second track, which is a copy. I am going to put C and align it so that these high frequency transients are aligned. Nice. So now this is the place where we want to create our loop. So I'm going to hit Z, no, no, I'm not gonna hit Z because I prefer to do a little fade out instead of breaking the timing. So Ctrl I, I'm gonna delete this, we don't need it anymore. But what we need is another track with this thing. So this transition seamlessly into this, but we need to overlay this tail on top of our, of the start of our loop or otherwise, we are not gonna have the reverb really looping around. And also we need to delete these empty parts in here. I'm gonna just go shift home to delete all of that. I'm gonna Ctrl select my second track and delete. Okay. As you can see, the tail is so long that it even exceeds the length of the loop. So I'm gonna just maybe delete it to this part and fade it out in here. I'm sure this is not gonna be a problem. Okay, let's select all maybe because that's all we have in our project. Copy, paste, right arrow paste, and let's listen to two cycles of this loop. That's seamless. Great. So let's undo these piece and I'm going to select all of that. Tracks, mix, mix and render to a new track. And I forgot to change my levels. So undo, double click zero, double click zero. And again, tracks, mix, mix and render to a new track. Now this loop is very loud. So even though these samples here are not zero and this isn't zero either, it doesn't matter because you can't hear this anyway. Okay, let's file export selected audio zero seven. And that's all the files looped in Audacity. All right, it's time to redo all of our looping in Ardor and I've saved Ardor for last because usually it's much faster to work with. Instead of dealing with these files one by one, I can very easily import them all at once. So that's first improvement in my opinion. And why I can do it is because I will still be able to manage everything. Okay, let me first arrange the files so that they actually now we can select them all, right click, select position and sequence regions. All right, okay, I've broken my sequence. So let's do it like that. Okay, to focus on the first file, I'm going to select it and hit Z, which will zoom it to view. And this is our keyboard typing. All right, so we can hear and see this is where the silence part is. And I'm just going to cut there using the S key, which cuts on my selection. Also, we are having snap enabled with a musical grid. So I'm going to disable this grid. So snap will still let me cut snapping to something but not to the grid. And I'm just going to delete these parts. Now find this part S to split, shift right click also deletes, which is very useful. And now I'm going to just hit Alt D to duplicate and we can listen to our loop perfect. Okay, so what we could do to export this now is right click, select the name of the region and go export. But I'm going to show you a different way, which is a little bit more complicated but comes with a huge reward as it's going to save you a lot of time, especially if you're going to be iterating on your files. And it's something I use all the time when producing sound effects because you can very easily export a lot of them at once. So I'm going to use range markers, not CD markers. I'm gonna actually to hide CD markers. Okay, and I'm going to click and hold Control, click and drag. I'm going to make sure this range is actually longer than my region here. So I'm going to call this double click and call this zero one. And now I'm going to hit Alt E to show the export dialogue. And this is where you define what to export from Ardor and where and how. What's interesting to us is the location, which is by default inside of the session, but that's not important right now. What is more important is format. And I'm going to see what we have here and let's select flak 24 bit as our baseline. But I'm gonna hit New and this is going to be a copy of what he has selected. I'm gonna call this SFX. And I'm going to make it maybe actually, yeah, it could be flak 24 bit. But an important thing is we could normalize it or we could not normalize it. And we want to trim the silence at start and at end. And this will be denoted here as trim. Let's save that. And you can see that SFX format is being used now. What we're gonna do now is go to time span. And here you can see multiple time spans. First is session. Session is the default, which is going from the start marker right to the end marker, which is outside of the current view. And 01 is the range marker we've inserted here. So I'm gonna select 01 and deselect session. This way we're going to export one file from this range. And because we're using silence trimming, it doesn't matter that our marker is longer than our range, it's going to be trimmed. So it's exactly as long as it needs to be. Let's hit export. You see Ardor has created an export and this is our file. We also have a nice analysis of the integrated volume, peak levels, true peak levels, our volume, our waveform, our spectrogram and also LUFS. What I'm gonna do now is go to our export folder. Actually, let's do this again. I'm gonna hit alt E and we'll change the export folder. Let's go browse, gonna move up and go weave examples. No, no, no, yep, Ardor. Okay, and that's the directory. Let's hit export again. And that will produce another file which is in this directory right there. Now, how can we make sure this is actually looping seamlessly? Well, let's open it up in Audacity. And I know it's a bit silly to use Audacity to verify that it's seamlessly looping when you export from Ardor, but this is what I sometimes do. Just to make sure, because Audacity is a pretty dumb program, so I'm sure it's not gonna cheat on us and do something smart to try and make it sound like it's looping seamlessly when it's not. Gonna make it march larger and I'm gonna play it. Perfect, let's keep Audacity around. We're gonna use it later. Okay, let's go back to Ardor. This is our first file, it's looped. Let's go to the next one. And this was our fridge ambience. Oh, we have an overlap with a different file. I'm gonna just move these forward. All right, these parts sound identical. I'm just gonna delete that, shift right with the leads as splits and just hit alt D and see what happens. Somehow it loops seamlessly. How does it work? Why? In Audacity, when we just did something like that, we had to click and we had to go with the zero crossings. Well, let me show you. If we zoom in a lot, you can see that we actually do have fade-ins and fade-outs and these are default created by Ardor whenever you split anything. Every region has these on the start and end. They are very, very short, but they are helping. So you can deactivate them. And if I do that, actually we weren't gonna have a click because luckily I just had found a place where the values are very, very similar. It might be a tiniest of clicks. Yes, there was a tiny click in the right channel as you can hear, as you could have heard. And it was this tiny, you know, you can see that there's a tiny misalignment of these. So if we just activate these default crossfades, what's going to happen is Ardor, we're going to fade them to silence very quickly and fade back. And it's a seamless transition. So that's it. This is all we need. Let's control and drag on the range markers ruler. Double click to name this O2 out E to show the export dialog. Now I'm gonna go to time spans, deselect 01, select 02, hit export and go to the directory. Okay, here is a nice ambient fridge sound. And here it is. Let's open it up in Audacity just to be sure. Control C, control V. I'm also going to zoom right in so you can see the waveform better. Make it a little larger and let's play it. It's gonna be long. Perfect, seems less to me. Good. Now let's do the third file. And this is our vocal. I'm going to turn down the track. Chicken select this and hit Z and that's going to maximize it in my view. All right, so what we can do is just do a split like we did before in Audacity. And just Alt D and see what happens. And you can see that just like in Audacity we have this nasty timber change. So we can't really do this. If we could synchronize these cycles perfectly, like you see we have a pretty good sync in here, we could make a crossfade. So let me see, maybe we can do that. Yeah, a crossfade is not going to be viable on this thing because of the tone. Now we could use a pitch correction plugin to make sure that the frequency is constant throughout, but I've made another video about this. So maybe let's not do that. Let's keep it simple. I think these two should go well. Let's Alt D and just see. Okay, this should be good. I just need to find a part where we are starting and going through the zero crossing. I'm going to right click and deactivate this little crossfade and okay, I'm going to disable snap. I kind of wish Ardor would have more precision and I could zoom in a bit farther, but I think we'll manage. Okay, let's deactivate it as well. Let's Alt D and listen. Okay, it doesn't work. There is a small click, but you know what we can do very easily. We can, I'm going to use another track. Move this down, extend it, turn on snapping. Split it here and actually do a crossfade on a single cycle. Delete this and let's try this again. I'm going to Alt D and let's listen to this transition. And it's seamless. Let me play this again. And now in slow motion. Awesome. Yep, this is all we need. Now let's control and track on the range markers ruler, call this zero three. We can reset the fader by shift clicking on it. Let's hit Alt E, go to time span, select third time span, export. And now this doesn't seem like it's perfectly looping. We have like a little gap, but if we open the file in audacity, you can see that there isn't really this problem. And if I copy and paste, you can see we do have a perfect loop. Let's maybe select all, right, control V, control E, yep, let's go home and I'm going to turn down the volume because this is going to be loud. On a side note, something like that is really cool. If you like detect which note it is, it is with a like a tuner and you put this into a melodic sampler and you use this for a lead instrument. It's, you can pitch it up and it sounds really fun. Like... Yep, funny things. Oh, no, no, no, let's don't, don't do that. Back to Ardor. You can see that we're doing these quite a lot faster than in audacity. And yeah, let's hit F. No, no, no, not F, Z. Okay, and here is our another loud one. Okay, let's hit this and this delete these, shift, right click, deletes. Select our crossfade length. Now it snaps to beginning. I don't need to snap it. And it also snaps to where the region underneath is. If I move this, you can see that our region underneath is ending exactly where this crossfade snaps to because I have snap enabled. Okay, let's play this. And that's really good. Let's alt D and see what happens if I go for this transition. And it is perfect. Why it is perfect? Probably because Ardor has applied our little tiny crossfade, but it's so short. It's completely unnoticeable and it kind of removes the need for us to care about zero crossings, which is hard to do sometimes, especially on stereo files. And especially with something like this where there's just noise. Okay, this is it, range markers. Let's create another one, call it zero four, alt E. Oh, no, no, cancel. I'm gonna shift click on this to reset the fader, time span, zero four, export. And yep, it looks like it's perfectly seamless. Just to be sure, let's drop it into audacity. I've already shown you that Ardor exports it and it is seamless, but let's do it. Oh, and I'm gonna turn it down. No seam whatsoever. Let's zoom in and you can see there's this tiny, tiny fade to black, fade to silence and fade from silence. So yeah, we could do this better. Theoretically, we could make a tiny crossfade instead and disable these fades, but it doesn't really make a perceptible difference. No one's gonna notice this. I don't notice this. It's seamless. Awesome, let's go to the sound number five. Up, Z. Okay, this is the street ambience. Now here is the wind blowing. I'm just gonna cut here with S, shift the right click to delete. And again, split to detach my loop point. Sorry, my loop crossfade part. Just add a crossfade and listen. Yep, that sounds perfectly seamless to me. Let's all to do this and play through this transition just to make sure. Okay, seamless. We could also delete this tiny thing which we have deleted in Audacity. Yeah, let's do this. It is here, so I'm going to just go S, S, shift the right click and I'm going to move this to here and shorten that region underneath. And because we're doing this, there's always a tiny over tiny crossfade. Yeah, we need to add our crossfade back. Yep, control, right click and sorry, control, click and drag, not right click. Rename this to 0.5, shift click on the fader to reset. Alt-E to open the export dialog, select our times, span, export. Okay, the last two sounds. This is going to be more difficult because remember in Audacity, we used a spectrograph view to tell where the sequence starts and ends. But in Ardor, we don't have a spectrograph view right now. It's just not there. But what we can do is help ourselves with some effects. So I'm going to control, middle click and drag down to create a new track. I'm going to add a little filter effect. So plug-in selector, filter and HCE high low-pass filter is what I'm going to use. Yep. And now the problem is we have this overwhelming bass tone. I've soldered the track. So if we, it's very loud, let's isolate this bass tone. If I remove this, the waveform should tell me much more about what's going on underneath. So let's use this high-pass filter and it's disabled high-pass, low-pass filter at all. Okay, but you can see it doesn't affect the waveform. This is because Ardor is fully non-destructive. All the effects in this effect stack are applied in real time as I'm playing this back, which gives me huge flexibility because I can automate changes like make these faders move as I play the time and et cetera. But in this case, I want to actually see the results. But we can do this. Let's hit R to go to the range mode, click and drag. And because we are using the snap mode, it also snaps to start and end off the region. I'm going to right-click now and do consolidate range with processing. Yep. And now you can see we have removed this bass tone from our waveform. We can see some detail. We can see some patterns emerging. Let me normalize this, hit alt and free to show the normalize dialogue. And this is going to be muted. It's just going to help us judge the cuts. Now, if I try to select both at the same time I can, but there is an easier way to do this. I can create a group just by clicking and dragging. And now if I select one or the other, if they would start and end at the exactly same spot, other would select them both. So I'm going to select them both and hit J to set my in point and then go to the end and press K to set my out point. Now if I select one, the other is going to be selected as well, which is going to be very useful because I'll be able to split them and rearrange the split parts, judging by this thing, but actually we only need this thing. Let's undo all these things and let's start and actually do our cuts. Okay, so what do we have here? You can see we have a little pattern going up. Same thing going in here. We can actually copy these two. Let's press and hold control and drag. This will create a duplicate and we can overlay them and we can move it and slide it until we have a match. Okay, this seems like it's overlapping pretty well. So we could do a cut here. Hey, yep. Okay, what I'm going to do is insert a sync point by hitting V and this is going to put a little arrow in all in these files. Now I can actually move and shift them to new tracks. I also want to split these regions in here. So I'm going to hit S, now they are separate and thankfully the snap mode just snaps to these sync points so it's very easy to hit that. Now I can select these two. Actually, if I make a group out of that, I can select them both again. I can move back and oh, I wish it would snap to the start of this region. Somehow it doesn't want to do that. Which is strange. Okay, I think it's perfect now. And let's snap to another one. Just snap to this sync point again and hit S. Now this should be our perfect loop. I'm going to copy this. Actually, yeah, set my playhead somewhere else, hit paste, oh, it's in different tracks, nevermind. We can control, sorry, we can middle click and drag it up and I can now play this. Actually let's duplicate them so we can hear the transition and I'm going to turn down the track. I think we got a bit more lucky because this sounds pretty much seamless to me, even though it's not, but Artor gives us this little fade. However, we can make this better very easily again, just by extending this part. And again, Artor makes things easy for us because if I move my mouse in here, you can see that the blue vertical line is snapping to the edge of the region below and you can just hit S, delete this and, oh, by the way, I should sync this. You can see we have our little, yeah, if I hit all L, I'm going to disable snapping for a little while and we can shift this so that it seems like the two cycles are overlapping. Yeah, this seems pretty good. Okay, now I just make a crossfade. Let's duplicate that and listen to this transition. Okay, that's pretty seamless, but there's a tiny little click. And that click is because the frequencies in here are so low that this fade actually creates an audible click. There is too much bass in here and we can't get away with an actual honest to God, zero crossing, at least not with this kind of thing. So we need to correct for that. What I'm going to do is delete this part and that part as well. And I'm going to find the nearest zero crossing. And I think this is going to be pretty close. So let's split it here and same like with audacity, I'm going to cut that part and paste it here in the end. The difference is I can't actually glue these together. I mean, I could, but it's much simpler to just select the first one, drag and snap it to the edge. Now I can delete this and we have our extended part. Awesome. Let's alter D to copy and listen again. Now there should be no clicks because our cut is actually on a zero crossing. And yes, we have tiny little fades, but they should be, yeah, they should not have any issues right now. Let's play this. And that is perfectly seamless. Okay, let's move this. I'm going to hit alt to just select this track. If I don't keep... Oh, it actually does work. Yeah, I'm selecting this and I'm going to hit middle click, move it up to the track zero six. I'm going to mute all of that because if I don't mute these, they will be exported as well. Let's control drag on the range markers ruler type zero six. Alt E to open the export dialog, select zero six as region export. And now look at this. And you can see there is a little problem. This thing is too loud. We are clipping and that is no good. And I'm going to show you why that is. It's very easy to fix. You see, we are using the default crossfade. Which is called constant power. And what it does is, most of the time it does a great job, but for this particular case where we have the tone, the base tone, which is overlapping perfectly, as you can see, almost perfectly close enough. Oh, wait, maybe we can make this overlap a little bit better, actually. Yeah, we'll be exporting this again in a while. So what actually is the problem is this crossfade is not flat. So if I right click and select linear, and the comment there is for highly correlated material, now this crossfade is going to be perfectly straight. Let me export this again and you're going to see the difference that it makes. And you can see there is no clipping whatsoever right now. We are peaking at 0.1 decibels below full scale, and the true peak is also at negative 0.1. So this is perfectly fine. All right, now just to have fun, I'm going to put this file to LMS, copy, paste. But first I'm going to turn it down because it's loud. Awesome, let's take a closer look. Yep, there's our tiny fades in action and our manually found zero crossing. Fantastic, I'm going to close this. Okay, the last, last, last thing we need to do is loop our little 0.7, which is here. And again, same as with audacity, this is going to be much quicker to do. So I'm going to hit Z. And now we can zoom in and see these hits. Let's listen again. I'm going to turn it down, it's because it's loud. Okay, let's control drag to copy. And I'm going to just move it so it's transparent. I'm going to disable snap. Actually, I don't have to disable snap. All I need to do is just hold alt and snap is going to be temporarily disabled. Let's zoom right in. Okay, it's right here. And we need to find our spot. So this is going to be the spot. Okay, so to save the spot, because I need to select the second hit. So I'm going to move my playhead in here and hit the enter on my numeric keypad. And this is creating a marker, which I can use to cut things later. Okay, I'm going to delete this because it's a helper. And now this shows me where the next hit would take place. And I'm going to move my mouse cursor. You can see that the blue vertical line snaps to this marker. I'm going to hit S to split, which separates my tail. I'm going to move it forward. And you can see in our door, we don't need to have a second track for this. I'm going to show you why. And we need to also do a split in here. I'm going to shift right click and I'm going to disable the default cross fade. And this is our tail. I'm going to shorten it because we don't need it to be so long. I'm going to make it, give it a fade out. And now the cool trick. If you right click, not on the fade on the region, select its name and go to gain. There's an option called opaque. If I disable that, this region becomes transparent. And what that means, it's not going to replace audio that was underneath it. It's going to be added on top of it. So let's hear this. Do you know where this is going? If I do Alt D now, now let's play for the transition. It's looping seamlessly. Let me delete that. Let's halt control, drag on the range markers. I'm going to shift right click to delete this marker. We don't need it anymore. Type zero seven, hit Alt E, select zero seven. And you know, just for the heck of it, I am going to show you how cool is the fact that we can. You know what? Let's select and fit all the tracks in here. We can now easily normalize this stuff. So I'm going to Alt three, normalize Alt three, normalize. This is our vocal. It's normalized it also. Let's normalize this one. And this street as well. Oh, actually I should not normalize this one. So we can control right click and open up. And we kind of region gain. It's 20.3 decibels. Let's go 20. Okay, I'm going to now, if you double click also, it opens the same dialogue. We can type 20. And now it's going to be the same volume. Oh, there's another one, 20. Cool, this is normalized. And this, this is normalized by nature. Okay, let's now go to the Mixer view. And I'm going to shift click on all the faders. And also remove these things. Yep, all the faders are reset. Let's go to edit and I'm going to go Alt E to open the export dialogue time span. I'm going to select all of them and hit export. And this will overwrite our files. So we are now exporting new and normalized sound effects with perfect looping all at once. Ardor is going to do all of this for us with a single click. No need to do this manually. We can just sit back and relax and we'll have our awesome files. And we have a nice little export summary. So this is our typing on the keyboard. This is our insides of a fridge. This is our voice loop. So there we have it. Looping sounds seamlessly in Audacity and Ardor. Oh, some part of this did not record actually. I don't know how long. All right, let's cut it here. I think now you know all there is to know about seamlessly looping sound effects both in Audacity and Ardor. I hope you can now make a decision on which tool is better for which job. Certainly the lack of a spectrogram is giving Audacity. Certainly because Audacity have a spectrogram view while Ardor doesn't, that's giving Audacity a little upper hand. But except for this one thing, everything else in my opinion is done faster, better and more conveniently in Ardor. So yeah, if you would like to learn Ardor, I have a playlist with, here is the playlist with many, many videos that can teach you Ardor. Starting from the very basics, going through some more advanced stuff. Yeah, so if you wanna learn Ardor, check out this playlist right there and I'll see you in there. Yep, that's it. That's all I have for today. If you would like some assistance, if you have some questions, you need some help with Ardor or other free and open source programs for music and audio production, maybe you're running Linux and you have problems with sound, especially making sounds, check out my community chat at chat.anfa.xyz. You will find there are a lot of awesome people who are like you making noises on Linux or with free and open source software on our opinion systems. And it's always easier to solve problems together. Thanks for watching. I would also like to thank all the fine people who are making this show possible by donating money. If you would like to support this show as well, please go to patreon.com.anfa or liberapay.com.anfa. And now go and loop some sound effects. Oh wow, that was, I thought that's gonna be like half an hour video. Half an hour tops. It's like quite a lot. Bye-bye.