This is probably the simplest, dumbest, newbiest thing, but I’m just getting started in my sequencing endevours.
Extract a loop from an audio sample.
e.g. I have a 3 minute long song, and I happen to know that between about 1:17 and about 1:34 is an exact loop (so if I could cut this portion out perfectly, I could loop this sample seemlessly).
Obviously trying to find the join manually is near impossible. So what tools do I need to help me rip samples like this / what’s the general name of tools that do this?
I don’t see why you couldn’t do it with Audacity or some other sound-editing program. You have to practice stopping the track at the right moment. It’s not hard once you get used to it.
I will say that I have found it a lot easier to cut out specific parts using the audio tracks on video-editing software, such as Premiere. It seems easier to me to find the sweet spot exactly.
In Audacity, duplicate a section a little bigger than you need, twice. Then shift one relative to the other so that the ending bit of one segment matches the beginning of the other as best you can. Then cut the overlapping part from one of them, and there you go.
You probably don’t want to spend $350, but Adobe Audition has this functionality built in. You create a loop from a .wav file and save it in loop format. Then you can open it in a track, click and drag on the end and pull it out to the right, and it will make as many repeats as you like, at whatever tempo you specify. It has beat finding and marking, so you can make perfectly-timed loops with no glitches. That’s just a tiny, tiny bit of what makes it worth the money.