VGM Looping - Processes and Tactics

[Calum]

At present I am working on a small game which shall remain disclosed but if you look not very hard at all you will found out. And what is expected is that I hand over mp3s (ogg.s actually) which will then be looped within the game development programme from start to finish. Which means that I must produce something which starts with silence and ends with silence otherwise the loop will be extremely unclean. For very ambient tracks this is very hard to do tastefully - I have resorted to fading out the track at the end which isn't the best result.

In other pieces where the main instruments don't have a ton of reverb or delay on them looping isn't as difficult but is still quite a chore to get just right.

In professional situations, what are the processes - because it seems that the soundtracks that loop do not have to wait for the silence before looping successfully. Is there some sort of inbuilt music section for looping in the development software? Which doesn't just rely on a bounced sound file?

[lazygecko]

Each song should be split into 2 separate file, one that plays the introduction, and the other is the loop file which is seamless at the start and end. Dunno what DAW you're using, but FLStudio lets you bounce with a wrap feature which is great for reverb and such.

[Moseph]

If you don't have a wrap feature available, you can copy/paste the ending stuff before the beginning so you'll pick up the reverb, bounce all of it, then trim the start of the wav so it begins in the right place.

[erineclipse]

yeah you need 2 parts the intro and main. also make sure the end musically fits into the beginning of the main.