Help setting sample for click free looping

Hi,

I need some help with this sample I have which is a straight 8 bar loop (some sort of whale song sound) that I want to loop on a Flex track.

I’ve watched/read quite bit about the AED in the Octatrack. Including how to use the FUNC key to find the 0 crossing points at the start/end of the sample.

I’ve even tried turning the sample to mono and I still get a click. I’ve I listen to the sample in Audacity or Ableton I get no clicking.

So what am I doing wrong please ?

testloop.aif (4.0 MB)

Thank you

Matt

Have you tried playing around with these parameters:

Setting ATK value above default 0 (to eg. 2) cuts sample volume at the beggining (for 2 units) before you hear it.
You can also attenuate the end of your sample setting HOLD and REL parameters at needed values.

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Set attack to 1 instead of zero might help.

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As mentioned
Set very small attack
Get start and end points to be zero ( very short fade in and out on the loop )
Maybe set length of trigger very slightly less that full ( eg 15.9 and not 16 ) with very short release

Fake a side chain effect ?

Cool. I’ll give that a go. Thank you all.

Can you clarify if it is clicking when just looping (playing free) or is it clicking only when triggered from sequencer?

I did some further tests and yes it is clicking when being triggered. If I just let the loop playfree then it doesn’t click. So I guess I could use a one shot TRIG and just let the sample loop.

Problem with that is the loop will eventually drift out of time with the sequencer.

A couple of options

Use timestretch.
Put a tiny fade using AED where the sample ends when being sequenced.

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Also if it is exactly 8 bars, go into attributes in AED and make sure you set it to 8 bars, the OT should then calculate the tempo, this will help the TS algorithm.

FUNC + REC2 Set your fade in fade out time to shortest time possible and re-record the sample.

Thank you all. These are great. I’ll give them a go.

Is the Octatrack your master clock, and if not are you syncing it to a DAW and is your MIDI interface USB?

I’ve never gotten tight enough clock from a USB MIDI interface to have loops play click-free on the OT, there’s always enough jitter to mess up the timing of the loop point, even if the sample itself is seamless. Even with time stretch on it doesn’t work for me. With the OT the master clock I can get completely seamless loops.

Basically, the jitter from the external clock is enough that the actual timing of the trig on the flex track will be off by a few samples every time, and it won’t be consistent so it’s hard or impossible to compensate for, depending on the material. Adding a short fade out at the end of your loop in the audio editor helps but it won’t sound good on some material.

At this point I just don’t use external clock for the OT under any circumstances. It’s stable enough that it stays in time with the DAW really well (I’ve recorded 2-3 Octatrack driven sessions on Ninjam every week since since April averaging around 90 minutes and haven’t had any noticeable drift yet) so I use it as the master clock for all of my hardware, set it to the same tempo as the DAW, and send start and stop from the DAW. It works way better that way, even with a USAMO. The Octatrack just doesn’t work well with external clock even if its a very stable one.