A good loop is invisible — it goes round and round and you never hear the joint. A bad one clicks, pops or drifts out of time every few seconds, and it drives everyone mad. The difference isn't luck; it's two simple things: cutting on the beat, and cutting where the waveform is silent. Get those right and any section of a song becomes a clean, endless loop. Here's how it works.
Two problems break a loop. The first is a click at the seam: if the waveform is high when the loop ends and low when it restarts, the speaker has to jump instantly between the two levels, and that jump is the click you hear. The fix is to cut at a zero crossing — the point where the waveform passes through silence — so the end and start meet at the same level. The second problem is drift: if your loop isn't an exact number of bars, it falls out of time with the beat a little more on every repeat. The fix is to cut on bar boundaries, locked to the track's tempo.
Loop a groove or chord section and play, sing or rap over it for as long as you want — no restarts, no gaps.
Export a tidy bar-locked loop and drop it straight into your project — it'll sit on the grid and tile cleanly.
A seamless loop fills a video, a livestream or a waiting screen without an obvious restart every few seconds.
Loop a tricky riff, solo or vocal run and listen to it over and over until you've worked out exactly what's going on.
A short, perfectly looping snippet makes a clean ringtone, podcast intro bed or social-media sting.
A click happens when the loop's end and start points are at different waveform levels, so the speaker jumps instantly from one value to another. Snapping both cut points to a zero crossing — where the waveform passes through silence — removes the jump. A tiny micro-crossfade smooths over whatever remains.
Cut the loop on exact bar boundaries. If the loop is a whole number of bars at the track's tempo, it lines up with the beat every time it repeats. AudioKit detects the BPM, lays a beat grid over the waveform and snaps your selection to it, so 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars are one click away.
Yes. AudioKit's loop maker exports either a single clean loop or the loop repeated 2 to 200 times, in the same format as your source file — useful for backing tracks, practice loops or layering in a DAW.