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CHAPTER

Looping

15

Sound Forge is an excellent tool for creating loops and provides the perfect compliment to Sony Pictures Digital’s revolutionary ACID™ line of loop-based music creation tools.

Creating loop regions in files is useful only when you intend to transfer the files to a hardware sampler that supports the loop regions.

Loops

A loop is a sample or region in an audio file that is repeated during playback. Samples are finite and frequently very short in length. Therefore, they must be repeated (or looped) to create longer or sustaining sounds.

Note: Loops can also be used to repeat entire sections of music in Sound Forge, although the playlist is better suited to this purpose.

Sustaining and release loops

A sound envelope contains four elements: attack, decay, sustain, and release.

Attack

Decay Sustain

Release

Typically, the sustain portion of the envelope is looped to lengthen the duration of a sound. This is referred to as the sustaining loop.

While sustaining loops are useful, it is frequently necessary to create a second loop, taken from later in the envelope. This allows you to reproduce longer, more complex sounds, such as a piano chord struck with the sustain pedal depressed. This second type of loop is referred to as the release loop.

CHP. 15

LOOPING