how to loop parts of a song

Question

Level 1

5 points

how to loop parts of a song

Is there a way (or an app) that would allow me to easily repeat any part of a song? As a musician, I would find this a very useful learning tool. Trying to 'slide' the track time bar back by hand a tiny bit to play the same 2 seconds of a song over and over is highly cumbersome. Is there a better way? e.g. it would be great if you could enter - for a track and have it loop indefinitely, or something similar which gives the same effect.

Posted on May 29, 2009 11:12 AM

Reply

Answer 1

PT

Level 7

20,894 points

May 29, 2009 11:21 AM in response to ratamaque

Well one way is in iTunes select the start and stop time (Get Info on the track) of the part you want to loop. OK out of there. Right click the song and pick "Create XXX Version" where XXX will be whatever your preferences are set for when you import music, e.g. "Create MP3 Version". When you pick that, iTunes will create a NEW (the original is untouched) version of the track in your library and will only be the part you specified with the Start/Stop times. Be sure to go back into the original with Get Info and reset the start & stop times.
So now you can add that new short track to your Touch. I don't know if the Touch works like other iPods, but you should be able to play that new track picking to repeat the track. On my 5th Gen iPod it is off the main menu in settings and one of them is "Repeat" which can be set to OFF, One, or ALL. Setting it to "One" will then loop whatever song you pick to play.
As a musician, you could make a bunch of these snippets and put them all into a playlist to make them all easily located in one place.
Cheers,
Patrick

Reply

Answer 2

May 29, 2009 12:52 PM in response to PT

i agree with Patrick, your request actually seems pretty specialist, and probably the only way to do it is how he suggested.
at the moment, apps can't interact with the music on the iPod, so it makes someone creating an app that can do this unlikely, but this may come in the future.

you can make feature requests here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipodtouch.html but i think it unlikely it will be implemented.

Reply

Answer 3

ratamaque Author

Level 1

5 points

May 29, 2009 11:42 AM in response to PT

Thanks for the suggestion. It sounds a bit labor intensive however to create separate track loops for every part of a song. Seems like the ability to loop anywhere within a track should be a built in feature.

I could probably live with manual fastfoward/backward, but the touch screen is not sensitive enough (at least for my fingers) to be able to predictably go back a very small increment, like 1 second. I suspect the non-touch based iPods with the button 'pads' might be better in this regard.

Reply

Answer 4

PT

Level 7

20,894 points

May 29, 2009 12:17 PM in response to ratamaque

ratamaque wrote:
Thanks for the suggestion. It sounds a bit labor intensive however to create separate track loops for every part of a song. Seems like the ability to loop anywhere within a track should be a built in feature.

There are a LOT of features people think should be built in, but they forget that just because they want to do something a lot of the time, doesn't mean everyone does. In your case, your need is rather specialized in my opinion, and therefore most people would have no need for it.
Yours is actually a straight forward request, but we see all kinds of weird setups people want to do and can't understand why it isn't supported.
"I want to be able to shuffle only the songs by three different artists, but have the iPod only play the songs that are less than 3 minutes, but once it starts on an album starting with the letter Z, it plays that album in order, then switches back to shuffling." 🙂
Good luck,
Patrick

Reply