Re: Gold wave, need help.
I can't remember if this has been asked here before or not, but does anybody know if it's possible to make seamless loops using it? I can make the loops perfectly fine using the whole song or recording, but it seems like if I save said loop as anything other than a wav, there's a tiny bit of silence added to the beginning of the resulting file. I know there are ways to save these wavs in other formats and keep the seamlessness using other programs, but is it possible to cut out the middle step as it were?
You asked this last year. The short and simple answer is: Wav, flac, and any other lossless format is your safest bet for producing seamless loops. Ogg often is gapless but sometimes produces small defects. Formats like mp3, m4a, etc. *may* work, under certain conditions. I'll talk about this in more detail below.
Wav is gapless simply by its simplistic design: just wr ite down 0s and 1s, no algorithmic compression is done. Any time you introduce a sophistocated compression algorithm (or an encoder), it gets more complicated. Most encoders split the audio into frames and process each one. The gaps you hear at the beginnings and ends of files are, put simply, partial encoder frames being filled, and perhaps padding.
Decoders convert encoded data like flac, mp3, m4a, etc. into a conventional audio stream very similar in fact to a wav file. Decoders can be instructed, with the help of the encoder, to eliminate gaps introduced by the algorithm, which for lossless formats like flac is mandatory. Ogg also is gapless. I wouldn't completely depend on it though, since Ogg is a lossy format, meaning it removes portions of the audio signal it deems inaudible. This tends to modify the audio just enough to make a carefully crafted seamless loop start clicking again, especially if the sound contains very distinct effects sensitive to the slightest of disturbances. Sound effects for a game, or samples for a digital musical instrument, are the most vulnerable to this. If it's a song or a full mix, however, using Ogg should be fine most of the time. Opus, a recent audio format which I think soon will replace Ogg, is similar. Some decoders and implementations aren't gapless, at least I used to use one that wasn't. But I think most are now. I still would be careful with it though, for the same reasons as Ogg.
With other formats it gets tricky. WMA Professional is gapless, but WMA standard isn't. And when you get to Mp3 and M4a, it gets worse. Neither format is gapless by design, nor are there any standards to make them gapless. So any implementations of those formats that do offer gapless playback are doing so via their own means. They're not really breaking the standard, as the extra information they use for their gapless playback will just be skipped by other decoders that don't support it, but it does make things look bleak. The Lame MP3 encoder does have gapless support so far as I'm aware, but I don't think Gold Wave supports it. It may be possible to make it do, but I've not looked into it since I don't use mp3 very often these days, nor do I use lossy formats for looping so much.
M4A is also tricky, as you've seen firsthand. ITunes can create gapless files which work fine on Apple decoders, but Gold Wave uses different decoders that can't interpret that. Furthermore, the Media Foundation encoder that Gold Wave uses isn't great, and very likely never will be gapless. Using gold Wave to create gapless m4a or mp3 files is probably futile.
The good news is that there are ways to make external encoders and decoders easy to use. They unfortunately won't work within Gold Wave, but they will be easier to use than, say, going into ITunes and converting files in there. I'll admit I'm really not sure how well that wou ld work, I'm only proposing an idea that I'll elaborate on in a future post if you are interested. I'd firstly though need to know what filetypes you wanted to make and where you wanted to use them, before I get too far into it.
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