Infinite loop for ambient soundpieces

Hello.

I'm looking for help on how to go about creating an infinite loop of a 1-3 minute audio loop that would play during a photo exhibition.

The audio is a slowly moving textural drone piece, so a long crossfade would be great, but I'm unsure about how to go about setting it up without having to set up a laptop running some program that would perhaps crash.

Is there some CPU-low applications for this purpose out there? I'm sure there are countless Max/msp applications, but I'm not familiar working with those setups.

Another dummy-proof way would be to create a x-hour long audio file of the piece, though it would be horrendously large, it would perhaps do.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

Tape loop?

Record the loop in its full, play the wav, have an ipod with the file nearby for backup

You could maybe burn 70 mins of the loop onto CD, have like a 1 sec fade up and fade down at either end and then put the CD on repeat. Won't be completely seamless, but should be able to repeat for as long as you wish

  On 5/23/2014 at 3:34 PM, psn said:

Tape loop?

Not nearly reliable enough.

  On 5/23/2014 at 4:04 PM, chim said:

Record the loop in its full, play the wav, have an ipod with the file nearby for backup

It does seem like it's the best solution. I would have to render it as .mp3, which probably wouldn't matter considering the headphones probably will be a low-end Sennheiser model.

  On 5/23/2014 at 4:27 PM, mcbpete said:

You could maybe burn 70 mins of the loop onto CD, have like a 1 sec fade up and fade down at either end and then put the CD on repeat. Won't be completely seamless, but should be able to repeat for as long as you wish

That's definitely an idea, though I'd like to try and work around that.

But thank you all.

Interesting problem. One solution would be to (a) make a copy of your sound with slow attack and decay, and with an amount of silence at the end equal to the sound itself, (b) load the file into two instances of any audio player that you can run two instances of, e.g. mplayer or vlc, and © start the sound on repeat in one player, then as it starts decaying out, start it up on repeat in the other instance. The two would constantly overlap each other, each playing the sound part over the silent part of the other.

That sounds ridiculous as I write it, but it's probably easier than anything programming-related, and would be very light on computer resources.

--Edit: just realized one of the files would have to have a shorter tail, and if you didn't time it just right, they'd slowly oscillate in and out of sync (which could be very cool sounding, but is clearly not what you're looking for). I guess if I were in your shoes, I'd make a cron job that ran the sound in mplayer every x minutes, overlapping with the previous one.

if your loop loops perfectly mp3/flac/lossless file player on repeat should work. digital has no moving parts which is what's going to cause gaps. just tried it with my phone and it seems to work. i think they actually even added a slight cross fade to make things loop better.

if you're using a computer, for on the cheap, you might try reaper, i've had that looping all day before with no issues, but computers, :) so try it out 1st.

Minidisc!

  On 5/23/2014 at 6:15 PM, lambda said:

Interesting problem. One solution would be to (a) make a copy of your sound with slow attack and decay, and with an amount of silence at the end equal to the sound itself, (b) load the file into two instances of any audio player that you can run two instances of, e.g. mplayer or vlc, and © start the sound on repeat in one player, then as it starts decaying out, start it up on repeat in the other instance. The two would constantly overlap each other, each playing the sound part over the silent part of the other.

 

That sounds ridiculous as I write it, but it's probably easier than anything programming-related, and would be very light on computer resources.

 

--Edit: just realized one of the files would have to have a shorter tail, and if you didn't time it just right, they'd slowly oscillate in and out of sync (which could be very cool sounding, but is clearly not what you're looking for). I guess if I were in your shoes, I'd make a cron job that ran the sound in mplayer every x minutes, overlapping with the previous one.

Certainly an idea, but it would, as you mentioned, end up being some Steve Reich-phasing piece if not synchronized perfectly.

  On 5/23/2014 at 11:16 PM, Jonah said:

if your loop loops perfectly mp3/flac/lossless file player on repeat should work. digital has no moving parts which is what's going to cause gaps. just tried it with my phone and it seems to work. i think they actually even added a slight cross fade to make things loop better.

 

if you're using a computer, for on the cheap, you might try reaper, i've had that looping all day before with no issues, but computers, :) so try it out 1st.

Now that you mention it, I even think iTunes allows you to adjust the crossfade between tracks. If an iPhone/Pod can do the same, that certainly is a solution.

  On 5/24/2014 at 12:43 AM, modey said:

Minidisc!

Then I'd much rather do a Gescom piece.

Thank you.

Unless you've already composed the soundscape, then make the intro and the end pulsate in a very slow manner. That way it'll sound like the intro and outro are the same.

  On 5/23/2014 at 2:54 PM, Hasselbalch said:

 

Is there some CPU-low applications for this purpose out there? I'm sure there are countless Max/msp applications, but I'm not familiar working with those setups.

 

just looping a one .wav file takes hardly any CPU and is not prone to crashes in most common audio software (e.g. Ableton Live, Adobe Audition, Winamp)