User guide

Tracktion 4 Reference Manual
122
4.7 : Looping Clips
An Overview Of Looping
Clip looping is a very powerful tool when working with MIDI and audio clips. The principal is the same
for both clip types, but the under-the-surface behaviour is signicantly different. We will start therefore
by looking at looping in its broadest sense, as it applies to both MIDI and audio clips, then we will look
at the specics for both clip types individually.
First, although the name may seem fairly descriptive, lets look at what the term ‘looping’ actually re-
fers to.
Looping, at its most fundamental, is simply the act of taking a single clip and repeating it for some ar-
bitrary number of times. You could achieve this quite easily be simply pasting multiple copies of the clip
one after another. What makes a loop clip different from a clip that has simply been duplicated, is that
the looped clip continues to act as one single clip.
Stated correctly, when a clip is in loop mode, it is not the clip that is looped, but rather the content
inside it. The effect from the clip perspective is that the content extends innitely beyond the end of the
clip. It doesn’t matter how long you make the clip, there will still be content there to see. The fact that it
is the content that is looping has major implications for looped MIDI clips, as we shall see later.
In Section One of this chapter you were introduced to the clip title-bar tools. You may recall the “L”
button located roughly at the centre of each clip’s title-bar. This is the toggle control that switches a clip
between looped and non-looped mode.
Figure 4.7.1 shows a standard MIDI clip, and Figure 4.7.2 shows the same clip after its loop mode
has been enabled and the clip has been stretched such that it loops a total of three times.
Each loop iteration is shown in the clip by a highlighted vertical line. This line makes it easy to see
the length of the original clip, and also how many times the clip is being looped.
When loop mode is activated, the boundaries of the clip dene the size of the loop. For example if
you had resized a four bar drum part down to two bars, then activated looping, it will be those two bars
that are looped. If you wish to change which region of a clip’s contents are included in the loop, you
can either disable looping for that clip, edit the clip size according, and then re-enable looping, or you
can drag the loop divider line horizontally along the length of the clip.
In most cases, operations that can be performed on regular clips will be available to, and work the
same on, looped clips.
For example, if you split a loop clip, you will simply end up with two loop clips that meet at the loop
point. Thus splitting a loop clip will have no audible change, just like splitting a regular audio or midi clip.
Similarly, if you use the stretch tools to resize both the clip and the content, the whole loop will simply
stretch as if it were a regular clip.
In a few cases such as merging MIDI clips, the looped clips will merge as normal, but the resultant
clip will not be looped. You can always enable looping once the merge is complete, of course.
Figure 4.7.1 Figure 4.7.2