Troubleshooting Transients

This article covers common causes of blurred transients/attacks at the beginning of the loop.

Loop Boundary Crossfade and Fades

Loopy Pro’s default settings are set to eliminate clicks at loop boundaries for loops recorded in real-time. “Clicky” loops result when there is even a slight discontinuity at the loop boundaries and when loops start or end with a non-zero amplitude.

Settings that eliminate the possibility of clicky loops may result in blurred transients if there is a sharp attack at the loop beginning. If you experience blurred transients, you will want to adjust the settings.

Loopy has three settings involved in click elimination/reduction: Loop Boundary Crossfade, Fade-In and Fade-out.

• Loop Boundary Crossfade is a short crossfade of the end of the loop and the beginning of the loop. The default setting is 50 milliseconds.
• Microfades: by default fade-in and fade-out are set to microfades, extremely short fades. These can be turned off by setting the fade value to hard zero.

For tightly trimmed loops that don’t click, the loop boundary crossfade can be set to zero and the fades can be set to hard zero.

These settings can be applied at the global, color and individual clip level.

Some people find that they can safely set the loop boundary crossfade lower than the default. Some fine-tuning is beneficial and may require a little trial-and-error.

Auto Loop Detection

When auto loop detection is turned on, there can be some blurring in the first playback cycle of the first loop due to the time to calculate the trim points. This is not affected by the settings mentioned in this article.

Actions Such as Unmute

Some actions such as mute and unmute have a slight fade in/out associated with them which is required to prevent clicks when muting and unmuting. (NOTE: almost all digital mixers have very short-scale fade in otherwise muting and unmuting would be very prone to clicks).

Recording Timing

If the transient cut-off is in the recording itself and not the result of the Loop Boundary Crossfade or Fade-In settings, the problem may have been in the recording itself. It is not uncommon when recording to start playing slightly early which results in the attack not being recorded. If you are using a MIDI controller to start recording, a slight latency in the controller can result in recording starting a little later than you think. There are a few things to consider:

• If the controller has some latency, you can adjust the Latency Compensation setting for the device in the Control Settings Panel.
• Consider using Audio Threshold recording. If you use this method, you may also want to turn phase preservation off. You may also need to lower the Loop Boundary Crossfade as it may blur correctly captured transients very close to the loop beginning.

Sync Issues

If you are recording from a MIDI synched plugin, app, or hardware device, you may need to adjust the Offset in the Synchronization settings.