Feature Request: More Looping Options

You know the music in video games? How they seamlessly loop? Well I suggest a few new looping features in Audacity for people who like to listen to video game OSTs frequently.

  1. Loop intro and outro.
    What I mean by this one is for songs like this that have a short intro before the looping part actually plays (in this case, the looping points would be rougly 0:29 and 2:14 and the intro is everything beofre 0:29). In Audacity, I would assume that you could select two areas in the track to right-click and set as “loop intro” or something, so that when you start the playback in loop mode, it will start it from the intro first and then once it gets to the looping section, it’ll actually loop that. And I would also prefer one for when you want to end a track that has a part that exits the loop (such as this song looping from 0:37 to 1:40 with the outro being everything after 1:40), even though not nearly as many songs have this.

  2. Start loop from wherever between the looping points
    This one is a little more of a small thing but I would like the ability to start a loop from some point other than the beginning, so that I don’t have to sit through the entire song to see if the loop is seamless or not, and instead, can select close to the end and see if it works. The hotkey for it could be ctrl+shift+click

  3. BPM Snapping
    I would LOVE the ability to change the BPM of a track and have it snap to each beat when I select points in the loop. Of course, this can be toggleable, in case some stuff loops off-beat, but still this would be very useful. Even for tracks with changing BPMs, you could select sections of different BPMs and change them all manually. And I know the rhythm track under generate lets you use the BPM to loop better but I think snapping would help it too.

  4. Loop Section Jumping
    This one is a little harder to explain, but hear me out. There are a select few songs in video games where the same track has many different looping areas inside of it, for instance, Scattered and Lost and Reach for the Summit from Celeste. They both have multiple variations of the melody depending on the area you’re currently at in-game, and kind of like the first suggestion, I think there should be more looping points you can add where you can switch between them. I do understand that this is a very specific feature request and the uses for this are also very minimal, but I still think it would be cool if it were to be added.

Well thanks for reading this! I just really like how Audacity already has a seamless looping option so I use it a lot for when I’m working on things, but I still think that it should be explored a little more. Bye for now!