Handing me a loop cut in Final Cut Pro
Short answer: yes, and it is the better path. Everything I do downstream is inference — I detect a tempo from a soft ambient bed that barely has onsets, snap to a grid I am not certain of, and blend the seam to hide what is left. You can just see the waveform and hear the bar line.
What to export
One WAV of the loop body alone. 48 kHz, 16- or 24-bit. Trim it at the two points that butt-join — the last sample of the loop should flow into the first. No fades at either end: a fade is a hole, and the engine can blend if it needs to. Nothing else in the file.
If you want to keep the chime intro, export it as a second WAV, ending exactly where the loop body begins. I will join them and set the loop point at the boundary. Do not export intro+loop as one file with a fade between them.
WAV, not mp3. MP3 encoders add ~1100 samples of silent padding at the start of every file. That padding shifts the loop point and is a real cause of a "tight" loop clicking once it ships. Give me lossless and I will handle the encode and measure the loop points on the DECODED audio, which is the only place they are true.
What I will do with it
- Measure the seam: level jump across the wrap over a 20ms window, plus sample step and slope break. A good hand cut reads near zero on all three, and I will tell you the numbers before shipping it.
- Join intro + body if you sent two files, and write TRACK_LOOPS.
- Encode once, at 192k, from your WAV — no second generation.
WHERE THE HOLES ARE (this is the useful part)
Scanned the master in 100ms windows. The track is not flat — it has composed breakdowns, and a loop that contains one replays it every pass:
| time | what happens |
|---|---|
| 46.5 - 51.0s | level dives from 77 dB to 60-68 dB, then slams back with +24 dB at 49.3s and +26 dB at 49.8s |
| 68.5 - 71.5s | second dive, down to 62 dB |
| 88 - 89s | smaller dip, down to 69 dB |
The shipping loop is 41.15 - 89.90, so it contains the FIRST TWO. That is the skip. Every candidate I baked kept the same start, so every one of them looped through the hole — which is exactly why none of them sounded better.
Clean stretches, if you want to cut inside one: 52 - 68s and 72 - 88s. Roughly 16 seconds each.
Why the earlier attempts were close but not right
The loop was 48.75s against a beat I measured twice and got twice different answers (0.65s and 0.97s — a 3:2 confusion). The onset envelope on this track is nearly flat, scoring 412k-549k across every tempo from 46 to 123 BPM, because it is a pad-led bed with no percussive attack. So the grid I am snapping to is reasoned, not measured.
Your ear caught what the numbers could not: B was "off by a couple of beats". Adding exactly two beats back (candidate D, 74 beats, 48.10s) takes the level jump across the wrap from -6.86 dB to +0.50 dB. That is the flattest of every candidate and suggests 74 beats is the true phrase length — which also means my very first bake had it right and I talked myself out of it.
Try F at https://hallpass.cc/loop-test.html — it is the only candidate that avoids the breakdown. If a 16s loop is too repetitive for a 12-minute night, that is the real answer to your Final Cut question: the useful cut is not a better seam, it is a longer stretch of this track WITHOUT a breakdown in it, which probably means editing the composition rather than trimming it.