Old 03-15-2018, 09:34 PM   #1
SilverHawk
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Default Loop background music for game

Hi everyone, new to the forum and somewhat new to Reaper. I've been trying for days to figure this out, and I'm pretty stumped.

I have a project that's meant to loop indefinitely for background music in a game, but I'm having a boatload of trouble getting it to loop correctly. Here's what I've tried:

1. Rendering normally, then splitting it up afterwards.

I gave up on this pretty quickly, because I couldn't match up the points where it should loop back to, even with the settings advised on this thread: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=109939. I figured it'd make sense to handle it internally inside Reaper.

2. Creating two regions - "Intro" and "Loop" - and rendering each to a separate file. The idea is that "Intro" would play once and "Loop" would loop as long as I need.

This had two problems - (1) there is a gap being inserted at the beginning and ends of each file, and (2) because all of the tracks are MIDI, the sounds from the end of the "Intro" region don't carry over into the "Loop" region, so the gap is exacerbated. There's probably a technical term for this, but I'm kind of new to this and I don't know what it is.

3. Rendering all tracks to stem tracks and mute originals, to convert the MIDI to audio, then repeating method 2.

This solved the "carry over" problem, but there's still a 0.5 second gap at the beginning and end of the region files. There was a setting for a tail at the end of rendering, and I made sure it was unchecked. I tried removing the gaps outside of Reaper, but even with that, it doesn't quite match up, as there's still a tiny click at the loop points.

---

Does anyone have any advice on the best way to do this? I thought that there'd be a nice and simple way, but I've been digging for a while and I can't figure it out.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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Old 03-16-2018, 03:02 AM   #2
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im not sure i entirely understand the issue, but here is a possible work around for you, turn off the snapping for time selection (magnet icon) and make your loop by hand so it sounnds right looped. Then press Shift, Alt and C and it will make a new bpm based on your looped timeselection. Now this bpm might be something like 164.3 or something but it works well.
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Old 03-16-2018, 04:12 PM   #3
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Thanks for the response! I gave that a try, but it didn't work as expected - it converted the entire region from 84bpm to ~27bpm, and since it messed up the tempo too much, I didn't try to see if the loop was right.

I did a little searching on this command, and I'm wondering if the problem is that the region I selected is more than one bar (the "Loop" region is 56 bars). Just as an experiment, I tried Shift+Alt+C on a single bar, and it preserved the tempo.

Maybe I can try to explain the problem better...my original idea was to render the file normally, go into Audacity, and split up the file at the beginning and end of the "Loop" region, which seemed easy enough because the times of those are exactly 00:17.5 and 02:32.5 in Reaper. However, splitting at those exact times didn't work, in that the start of those bars are slightly shifted, and I can't find the loop points in Audacity. I thought it might have something to do with the sample rate based on the thread I linked, but I couldn't figure it out. Ideally, I just wanted to get it so 00:17.5 in Reaper is the exact same spot in the rendered file, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Everything else I tried was just workarounds using Reaper; I figured there had to be an easier way to do this. At first glance, rendering to separate files by region seemed to be it, but I couldn't get it to work because of the MIDI vs. audio issue and the gap that Reaper seems to insert. I'd love to get this method working, but if I can fix the original issue, that'll work too.
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Old 03-16-2018, 06:30 PM   #4
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From REAPERBLOG

Making Seamless Music Loops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahsbmzAqXUM
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Old 03-17-2018, 01:23 AM   #5
colonelporridge
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SilverHawk View Post
Thanks for the response! I gave that a try, but it didn't work as expected - it converted the entire region from 84bpm to ~27bpm, and since it messed up the tempo too much, I didn't try to see if the loop was right.

I did a little searching on this command, and I'm wondering if the problem is that the region I selected is more than one bar (the "Loop" region is 56 bars). Just as an experiment, I tried Shift+Alt+C on a single bar, and it preserved the tempo.

Maybe I can try to explain the problem better...my original idea was to render the file normally, go into Audacity, and split up the file at the beginning and end of the "Loop" region, which seemed easy enough because the times of those are exactly 00:17.5 and 02:32.5 in Reaper. However, splitting at those exact times didn't work, in that the start of those bars are slightly shifted, and I can't find the loop points in Audacity. I thought it might have something to do with the sample rate based on the thread I linked, but I couldn't figure it out. Ideally, I just wanted to get it so 00:17.5 in Reaper is the exact same spot in the rendered file, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Everything else I tried was just workarounds using Reaper; I figured there had to be an easier way to do this. At first glance, rendering to separate files by region seemed to be it, but I couldn't get it to work because of the MIDI vs. audio issue and the gap that Reaper seems to insert. I'd love to get this method working, but if I can fix the original issue, that'll work too.
Yeah , i was not sure if that would work for you but if that portion was at 27bpm that might not be an issue as the rest of the track will still be at the original bpm or any bpm you want.
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Old 03-19-2018, 09:02 PM   #6
SilverHawk
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Quote:
Originally Posted by X-Raym View Post
From REAPERBLOG

Making Seamless Music Loops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahsbmzAqXUM
Thanks, this did the trick! It solved the MIDI -> audio issue, and I think I figured out the weird gap issue was actually caused by rendering to MP3. At the very least, it went away when I did what was in the video, and rendered to WAV.

I do want to ask, though - in terms of workflow, is it possible to do this without needed to render twice like the video does? I get the need for the MIDI -> audio conversion as a first step before splitting/rendering to regions, but it'd be really nice if there was a way to make the process more automatic. Any thoughts?
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Old 03-20-2018, 01:58 AM   #7
X-Raym
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Maybe by extending your loop left.. but be careful with reverb and delay time :P

I'm not sure, it has to be tested.
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