Looping
Looping music is one of the best ways to practice. Get your instrument (or voice), loop a recording of your teacher (or favorite artist) and play along, trying to match their pitches, tone and timing.
Creating loops
If you’re using a computer with a mouse, just click and drag anywhere in the music to create a loop. From then on, playback will be limited to the section you’ve selected.
As you drag across the music, we’ll automatically “snap” to notes, rests and barlines — making your loop nice and tight. And we’ll fade out the rest of the notation, letting you focus on the specific section.
Resizing loops
Adjust an existing loop by clicking and dragging either its left or right edge.
Clearing loops
To clear a loop, just click or tap anywhere in the notation.
Looping on mobile devices
To create a loop on a smartphone or tablet, first tap the “Loop” icon in the control bar. This will create a loop in whatever measure the playhead is currently in. From there, you can adjust the starting and ending points by tapping and dragging.
The loop menu
When a loop is active, you’ll see the following little menu appear toward the bottom of your music:
This tells you which bars you’re looping — “Bars 11-12” in the above image — and it has a few buttons:
- Focus opens focus mode for the selected music.
- Save lets you save the current loop as a clip.
- opens a menu with a few options for playback: “Play with count-in” and “Play loop only once.”
Play a looped area just once
If you’d like a selected passage to play only one time through, click in the loop menu and select “Play loop only once.”
This might seem counterintuitive — to play a loop once — but it can be a handy way to practice. At your own speed, you can start the same passage over and over without having to manually navigate to the start of it each time.
How precise is the looping?
Loop precision depends on the type of audio that’s synced with the slice. Here are the various cases:
| Slice audio | Looping behavior |
|---|---|
| Audio-only (with “enhanced slowdown”) | Loops are perfect, to the level of audio sample, and will sound identical each time through. |
| Audio-only (without “enhanced slowdown”) | Loops are nearly perfect; their duration may differ by a few milliseconds each time. |
| Video | Slight delay between each loop iteration, depending on video quality and length of loop. |
| Synthetic | Loops are nearly perfect; their duration may differ by a few milliseconds each time. |
If you’re creating slices and want to enable the most precise loops possible, use an MP3 as opposed to a video. Or, hey, why not do both — offer a video and an MP3, and let people switch between them.