This information on looping music in Aleph One has been split off from my advanced mapmaking guide because Aleph One 1.7 redoes the music engine in a way that makes much of this unnecessary. If you’re interested in supporting old versions of Aleph One, you’ll still need to follow these steps to make music loop seamlessly (and you’ll need to test them in Aleph One 1.6.1 or earlier), but if you’re only interested in supporting Aleph One 1.7 or later, you can ignore the information found here.
Before consulting my advanced guide, you’ll probably want to start with my beginners’ guide. Please contact me if you notice any errors or omissions.
For the record, I’m not talking about the music restarting after it fades out – Aleph One does that by default. I’m talking about seamless loops, where the ending leads straight back into the beginning. Aleph One could do this before version 1.7, but it was very finicky and dependent upon a few things:
Thus, in this case, the number of samples modulo 1024 should be as close to 1023 as possible. (You can find out how many samples your music file has in any audio editor worth its salt.) In other words, the ideal number of samples for a loop is (1024 * n) – 1, where n is some integer. It’s acceptable for it to be (1024 * n) – 2, (1024 * n) – 3, (1024 * n) – 4, and so on, but the more the distance increases, the longer and more perceptible the delay gets. The longest delay results from 1024 * n samples.
Manipulating your song’s length by fewer than 23 milliseconds probably won’t audibly affect the rhythm if you’re careful to fill up the space you add with audio information that isn’t out of place, or to trim audio congruously. (iZotope RX’s Interpolate function can help to generate audio that will fit.) If silence ends up getting tossed into there, though, you’ve got a problem.Back to top · Table of contents · Mapmaking (basic) · Mapmaking (advanced) · Contact me · Website index