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How do you loop a track?
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 11:01 pm
by bellaviva
How do you loop a track?
I want to take a 5 minute voice recording and loop it for 45 minutes, so that it keeps repeating itself. I then want to place the looped vocal track onto a musical track. I want the vocal track to start at about 7 minutes into the music track and end at 7 minutes before the end of the music track. I then want to save the mix and be able to replay it with the vocals looped. I would also like to add a binaural-beat track to that to finish it off. I have not been able to figure out how to do that.
Thanks!
Re: How do you loop a track?
Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 12:54 am
by kozikowski
Put the music on the timeline. Edit > Select > All. Copy.
End > Paste > End > Paste. etc. Repeat to 45:00.
Control-F to see the whole show.
Tracks > Add New > Stereo.
Paste or Import the vocal into the new track and use the timeshift tool (left and right black arrows) to push it sooner and later. Loop as above.
<<<I would also like to add a binaural-beat track to that to finish it off.>>>
See: Tracks > Add New, Paste or Import > Timeshift and Loop.
Koz
Re: How do you loop a track?
Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 1:01 am
by kozikowski
It's best if all these tracks arrives already in WAV format. MP3s make sucky production masters because you always end up recompressing them and they get bubbly.
You can use the Solo and Mute buttons to the left of each track to turn the tracks on and off, and the Envelope tool to affect the volume as each track plays.
You will need to reduce the volume of each track with, say, Effect > Amplify to about -10dB or so before you mix and export. Otherwise you could get into overload and excessive volume problems.
If any of your tracks arrives with DC level, it will make looping very difficult, so Normalize > Remove DC on each track.
Multi-track productions can be saved in Audacity Project format, but this will not save UNDO. If you Export to WAV or MP3, Audacity will mix down to stereo. Audacity will not Save sound files.
Koz
Re: How do you loop a track?
Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 12:48 pm
by steve
bellaviva wrote:I want to take a 5 minute voice recording and loop it for 45 minutes, so that it keeps repeating itself.
1) "File menu > Import Audio" or record the 5 minute voice recording
2) Trim off any excess sound or silence from the track.
3) Select the sound that you want to repeat - you can select the entire track by double clicking on it.
4) "Effects menu > Repeat..." Enter the number of repeats that you want (8 repeats to make 5 minutes loop for 45 mins.) and press "OK"