Making a sound that's loopable.

Question

I want to make a rocket 'whooooooooooooooooooosh' sound that can go on FOREVER. I have the sound I like, I just need some protips on making it loop. I've been hacking away at it in Pro Tools, and when I loop it in there, it works, but when I implement it in the game I'm working on, there's a clear loop point. Any idea how I could remedy this? I also saw the Rabbit Ears Audio rocket pack, which would be like, perfect for what I'm doing. If you were taking a sound from a library, what would you do to it to make it something that could loop?

Answer 1

Try it in game. You probably won't notice the loop as it's flying by you. If you do, take that same sample and offset it in another track in Pro Tools. Bounce that down and loop that. That should help remedy it.

If that's really not solving the issue then look for another static track to layer in. Jet airplanes are good for rocket bys.

Be sure that your loop point is at the zero crossing as well. If you game dynamically pitches it (with doppler effects) or you pitch it in game you could induce a pop/click in the loop as well.

Answer 2

hmm... maybe there's a way to combine it with a Shepard tone so the doppler is "continuous" (assuming our perspective is fixed from outside the rocket)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

Answer 3

if you are into the game industry, check the spec of the audio engine. if you are more into the post production area, check AKAI sampler or Kontakt might be useful. I have successfully use a sound of a food processor to create a sustaining rocket-interior kind of sound using an Akai sampler (S-1000)

Answer 4

surely the way is to seperate construction of the events

the doppler effect is most noticeable when it passes the listener, so from launch, to close passby, to close away use Michaels awesome rocket sound

then

1. make the constant rocket engine sound (like you have a mic gaffer-taped to the side of the rocket)

2. apply the doppler via a very long/slow LFO'd filter of the constant rocket sound! it would take some matching.... and some epic verb! but who is going to check that it actually goes on FOREVER? (could you ask them to also check my perpetual motion machine while they are at it?)

Answer 5

This may sound simplistic but I'll be glad to share what I've learned from a recent game project earlier this year. Make sure you have clean heads and tails. You may be able to loop well in Pro tools because of the region you selected. But when you play the wav file completely, you may still have some audio at the start and at the end that could and should be trimmed off for a clean loop.

Also, if you're using it for a game and space is an issue then the problem may occur when converting from Wav to MP3 file. If you're broke, like me, then you might not have the DV toolkit yet which allows you to bounce mp3 files. Recently, I used a program/media player called VLC to convert a wav file to mp3. But for some reason, VLC doesn't make a clean conversion, there's always some extra audio at the end and/or beginning of the file. Your best bet then is to use the free program, Audacity, to do your wav to mp3 conversions. Your MP3 files will come out with no extra filler added that would make a clean loop impossible.