looper question

vonhansen's icon

Hello all,

I have a question about looping and synchronization

Lets say I have a loop that is 8000 ms long and I have a metro beating at 500ms. This basically makes 4 bars, 4 beats long each. After I have recorded one loop I want to add another on top but I want to make sure when my looper starts it comes in directly in sync with the start of the first loop so they are synchronized. I would also like a count in.

So I want to trigger the second loop (at any point within the 8000 ms) but have it wait until there is 2000 ms left in the first loop then trigger a count off (in sync with the metro 500) and begin recording directly in sync with the other track.

Hopefully this makes sense. I am having a hard time figuring out exactly how to articulate this question.

Thank you

Source Audio's icon

What You need is quantised record start and end.
But if next loop has to be same length as the first one,
You can just start recording by letting audio in at any point in the loop.
Otherwise You need Signal Trigger that can start or end recording.
Having metro that runs parallel to Audio Loop will not be precise enough
to work as Trigger, for that it MUST be some sort of Signal Division/trigger.
If You post details on what objects You use for Looping, one could suggest solutions.

Evan's icon

Not really clear what the question ended up being? If you're asking if what you describe is possible, then the answer is yes. If you're asking how to do what you describe, that's a longer answer.

But yeah, I'd forget the metro, and do your timing/synchronization of a phasor~. A phasor running at 2 Hz would be equivalent to a metro banging every 500 ms. Keeping all of the triggers/timing in the signal domain might be helpful, as source said.

vonhansen's icon

Thank you for the information. Last night I came up with a way of doing this with a metro and counter (I have attached the patch). It works and accomplishes the basic idea, but you are right the metro begins to get out of sync with the playback. I have not worked with phasor~ before. I will look into this. I would appreciate any help If you have any ideas of ways to implement phasor~ in a way that is similar to what I have posted.

Thank you

LoopSync.maxpat
Max Patch
Source Audio's icon

Hi, I asked if You could post the actual looping mechanism, I mean are You using record~ and groove~ combo,
or count~ with poke~ and index~ etc.
Depending on that, one would look for best way of getting several loops synced.
The way You are trying to accomplish this is unfortunately wrong, You need something
that measures initial Loop recording length, than scales that to Bar/Beat division
and use the signal based trigger to start/stop recording or playback for additional Loops.
I am programming and selling Looping software for Live usage since many years,
and most difficult thing allways was to make a good plan with a customer, listing
all functions Loop should be able to perform etc.
Than You start developing, otherwise You end up starting from scratch again.
So I‘ll be glad to put some ideas together for You, just let me know what loop should
be able to do.