I’m working on sound effects for video games.
A great thing in Ardour is I can export multiple files at once defined by CD ranges
(maybe they should be renamed to export ranges
at some point BTW?).
What I miss however is the ability to export seamless loops.
I usually have to coerect the exported files in Audacity to achieve gapless playback in the game.
I think this could work as follows:
CD ranges could have a “Seamless” option. If it’s activated - Ardour renders out a bit of the audio after the range is over, and then mix this tail back to the front of the sound effect, optionally performing a crossfade. This is what I’d have to do manually in Audacity to ensure seamless looping of my sounds.
User shuold be able to define if there’s going to be a crossfade or not.
No crossfade:
Tail is just mixed to the start without any attenuation.
With crossfade:
Tail is being cross-faded with the head of the export over a pre-defined duration.
User should be able to define how long the tail is, - possibly with an additional visual marker connected to the CD range. Crossfading should also be denoted.
An obvious problem that may occur here is that after this operaton is performed, there might be clipping or other volume spikes not accounted for by the master bus processing.
I am not sure how to avoid this without breaking the seam, other than with normalisation (like Ardour already does).
I am thiking if it’d be possible for me to use soemthing like Sox to post-proces the sounds to loop them, but an in-Ardour implementation would be very nice, as the user could easily tune the looping to each individual export range.
This would not only be useful for sound effects, but also for looped game music and stems for use in live loopers.
Here’s a little mockup:
What do you think abotu this?