Post by torcado in To loop a track

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Hi, thanks for the question! Loopable tracks is a good suggestion, I can see that being useful especially for showing off looping background music.

There’s a lot to think about for the first request to make it clear to the user what’s happening. Looping a track continuously would be fairly simple, it would just mean requiring the user to skip/click on the next track in order to continue the playlist. With a set number of loops I think there should be a counter somewhere, and there would have to be a decision made about what actions cause the counter to reset. A looping region is more complicated to support, but a lot of the ui I made for the preview region could be reused for this.

For the second request, I could see a solution where the play button switches to a loop-play button maybe by holding shift or long-pressing for mobile, or alternatively with a toggle switch somewhere near the top.

Let me know if you have any immediate thoughts, either way I’ll look into implementing some part of this soon!

Yadu Rajiv2 years ago

I think we are thinking pretty much along the same line.

The looping region seems to be the challenging bit, but if these are BGMs or looped tracks, they are most likely to be looped in its entirety. So, it feels that the looped region seems to be the last thing one might need.

The set and edit track preview section can just have a straightforward loop ☑️ and a count 0 (being loop infinitely to N). When on, it can essentially just disable the region setting clipping options like how the "audio is pre-clipped" does it, 🤔 the rationale behind having a count for the loop is to play the piece for a fixed number of times and then skip to the next track.

I was thinking of pressing shift (which you do in audacity to play once 😅) and long press is cool too! But, now thinking about it, if you let the end user decide if the track needs to be looped in the player, then you'd probably still have to take care of looping regions too 🤔

Aside: I think a lot of players use this for repeat 🔁 and repeat one track 🔂 and also ♾️ for loop same track.. I think 🤔

torcado2 years ago(+1)

Thanks for your insights! I think I have a good idea of how to handle this now.

I was thinking about it more last night and I realized having an option to loop the whole playlist would also be useful. Most players use exactly the icons you mentioned at the end, so I think it would make sense to have a toggling button that switches between no loop, playlist loop, and single track loop.

I’ll look into implementing this soon :)

Yadu Rajiv2 years ago

🙏 Thank you so much! and all the very best! :)

Yadu Rajiv2 years ago

Aside from looping the whole playlist, in my case specifically for the kind of music (very tiny looping tracks) I make, looping a single track makes sense too 🙈 - Mini Loops by Yadu Rajiv (itch.io)

Either way :) looking forward to how you go about solving this! All the best again! 💪😊