CARVE / PRACTICAL GUIDE
How to Check and Improve an Audio Loop Seam in CARVE
A loop has to connect musically as well as at the waveform level. CARVE lets you hear the end-to-start transition directly, so you can check the join without listening through the entire file each time.
Choose a musical boundary first
Open an audio file that you have permission to edit. Find a start and end that belong together rhythmically and harmonically. A technically quiet cut can still feel wrong if it drops a beat, truncates a reverb tail or jumps to a different musical phrase.
Select the loop and use Seam
- Drag across the waveform to select the intended loop. Selection edges snap to nearby zero crossings; hold Shift while dragging for a raw position.
- Press Seam. CARVE plays up to one second before the selection end and then continues from its start. With no selection, it checks the file end against the file start.
- Listen for a click, sudden level change, missing beat or interrupted ambience. Adjust a boundary and audition again.
Zero crossings help, but listen to both channels
A sudden jump in sample amplitude can cause a click. Crossing near zero can reduce that jump, but it does not guarantee a clean join: the waveform direction, stereo channels and surrounding sound may still differ. CARVE's zero-cross search uses the first channel, so listen to the complete stereo result.
If the waveform joins but the music still lurches, revisit the phrase boundary. A fade to silence at each end can be useful for a standalone sound, but on a repeating music loop it can create an audible dip. Do not treat a fade as an automatic seamless-loop fix.
Set the two markers for OGG export
Place the play cursor at the start and press M, then repeat at the end. Keep the intended loop boundaries as the first two markers in time order. The Snap control affects marker placement on the beat grid; use Shift when you need to bypass that grid. Double-click between the markers to select their span and run Seam again.
When you export OGG, CARVE writes LOOPSTART from the first marker and LOOPLENGTH from the distance between the first two. Selecting audio alone does not create these tags.
| Start | 2 × 48,000 = 96,000 samples |
|---|---|
| End | 10 × 48,000 = 480,000 samples |
| LOOPSTART | 96000 |
| LOOPLENGTH | 480,000 − 96,000 = 384000 |
Check the exported file in its destination
Loop tags are sample positions, not milliseconds. Resampling changes their meaning unless the positions are recalculated. OGG encoding needs a network connection to load the encoder, and the destination player or game engine must support the loop tags.
Reopen the exported OGG in CARVE to check the restored markers, then test it in the actual playback environment. That final check catches differences that an editor-only audition cannot establish.