Topic: Who would like to see an A-B Loop in Media Center? (Read 5055 times)

kwake · « **on:** October 13, 2003, 06:36:34 pm »

Just wondering if there are any other musicians (or whomever else may be able to make use out of it) that could use an A-B Loop function to set a start and end section in a song file, and have it repeat without taking your hands of yer guitar?

Thanks for your input.

bvm · « **Reply #1 on:** October 13, 2003, 08:43:25 pm »

Never mind the guitar -- I'm a singer, and would find this kind of thing useful for rehearsing tricky lines (I do it now on my CD player).

nila · « **Reply #2 on:** October 13, 2003, 09:02:48 pm »

A-B loop as well as tempo control, etc.

Some advanced playback features would be sooooo welcomed -for both audio and for video!

RandyP · « **Reply #3 on:** October 13, 2003, 11:22:21 pm »

I would have used it for testing the differences between MP3 encoding formats.

DJ_Hazelwood · « **Reply #4 on:** October 14, 2003, 12:46:20 am »

Would be great to have A-B Loop and tempo-change.

And some more possibilities for realtime-fading.

In the current version we only can set the fade-time in the options. And playback must be stopped if the changes should take effect.
But sometimes i should change the fade-time while MC is playing. Would be great if we could have such a feature. What i also would like to see is the possibility to control the fade-time via the MC-Automation-SDK. Then i could write a plugin to control the fade-times dynamically.

kiwi · « **Reply #5 on:** October 14, 2003, 03:19:16 am »

Yeah... with this feature, I'd like to have the ability to A-B two different loops... A-B one then A-B the next and then back again.

But it's not that big a deal for me.

kiwi

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #6 on:** October 14, 2003, 03:29:37 am »

I would definitely use this feature especially if it could be combined with temp change although I do not think it needs to be part of MC...I am sure it could be written as a plugin. I have pacemaker on Winamp (Cheers Nila!! Welcome back...) which does this and I am sure it could be ported to MC...

Adam

kwake · « **Reply #7 on:** October 14, 2003, 02:54:37 pm »

I'm hoping that JRiver sees this request as a simple one - A-B Loop. $:-\$

I'd appreciate if the requests for other features such as tempo control, etc. are made in separate threads. Seems to remind me how bills are passed in the senate...

I'm worried that JRiver will feel that doing it all will be too complex and forget about it. I truly believe that an A-B Loop should be quite simple to implement: Two new buttons in the GUI ( button 1 = Start/End of loop) (button 2 = clear). Seeing as the file is already buffered into memory in advance makes me think it shouldn't be hard to mark 2 spots and loop it.

If it's not possible, can someone at JRiver respond in this thread with a short explanation as to why? It would make it easier for me to understand and stop asking if I knew how complex it would be.

Thanks,
Kwake

kiwi · « **Reply #8 on:** October 15, 2003, 07:50:24 pm »

just figured that I'd point out that you can do a-b looping with the media editor.

kiwi

kwake · « **Reply #9 on:** October 16, 2003, 04:43:59 am »

Thanks for your post Kiwi! I'll definitely have a look at that some more...

However, it would really make it easy if there was a button somewhere in the main interface to mark the sections for looping. (two very small buttons, one for A-B and one for Reset).

I spend alot of time learning songs and it kind of sucks to have to stop playing and use the mouse to set the marker back to the start of the section I'm learning - which may continue for many cycles depending on the complexity of the tune.

If the Media Editor does this well, I guess I won't really have any reason to continue asking for it though...

Thanks,
Kwake

kiwi · « **Reply #10 on:** October 16, 2003, 06:12:12 am »

In the media editor, select the "loop play" button... or "play loop" button. Something like that. Then select the segment of the music that you'd want to loop through. then hit play.

In some ways, it's probably nicer because the selection of your loop period is done with your mouse, as opposed to trying to hit a button when you want to start and stop the loop.

kiwi

kwake · « **Reply #11 on:** October 16, 2003, 06:28:17 am »

Hi Kiwi,

I'm trying it now...but unfortunately it's taking too much time to be an easy to use solution. It first decodes the MP3 (into Wav), then opens the file (another 'loading' dialog displays) and finally I have the waveform in front of me. (which is surely taking up 10 times the space on my drive uncompressed).

By this time with an a-b button, I'd be playing along with the section of music.

With Meda Editor, I now have to proceed to find the area I want (which isn't so easy just by looking at the waveform), select it (again not easy to do perfectly) then loop it. Selecting by ear (which is also how I play) would be the most intutive method.

An a-b loop button that takes the buffered section of mp3 file that is already in memory would be ideal. Does anyone at J River have any thoughts on this? Are there any guitar players on the Dev team?

Regards,
Kwake

knickelfarz · « **Reply #12 on:** October 16, 2003, 07:00:18 am »

I also think that A-B loop and tempo control would be usefull expansions...
The ideal "userinterface" for setting and controlling A-B loops still seem to be two "markers" above or underneath the position slider which define a range where the playback loops... When moving these markers, the display shows the exact time position... Maybe harder to implement, but easier to use

It would be cool if there would be db fields to save loop/marker positions for tracks... maybe together with tempo and fadetimes... hello dj

kwake · « **Reply #13 on:** October 16, 2003, 07:27:10 am »

Thanks for your post knickelfarz, very interesting ideas.

Does your idea come from a current media player you know of that has the A-B Loop feature for MP3s???

Thanks,
Kwake

knickelfarz · « **Reply #14 on:** October 16, 2003, 08:31:44 am »

Well, this "marker stuff" is of course nothing new, most audio/video programs use it for cutting (and they work with decompressed material...) - but for a "play along" feature, wouldn't it be enough to just *set* the playback position? I think Quicktime Pro does this for most file formats.

Also the interaction with a database is nothing new, programs for editing mostly also have these functions - with another target... But there's no other *player* with such toweringly db features than MC - I think it could be an enormous help for dj's if they could combine the db with functions like looping, fading and tempo control...

Sounds easy, but maybe the question should be:
"Who would like to see an A-B Loop in Media Center 10 or 11?"

UrfTheWog · « **Reply #15 on:** October 25, 2003, 08:40:57 am »

Yeah, this is a feature I'm really missing right now since I'm in the middle of learning a bunch of new material. Pretty much a must-have for musicians.

Markeau · « **Reply #16 on:** October 25, 2003, 03:35:05 pm »

That sounds like a useful feature. But what I'd like more are:

1) Ability to Send To any one or more tracks from Zone 1 to Zone 2 or vice versa

2) When burning a list of tracks to cda and the list is too long to fit on one cd, ability to auto fade out the last song that will fit.

kwake · « **Reply #17 on:** October 25, 2003, 08:28:24 pm »

Well Markeau, I certainly hope you get better feedback from J River on your requests that I did on mine.

I was hoping for any feedback from the Dev team, such as "Yes, maybe that would be do-able" or "No, that's not in our plans for the moment". Unfortunately after several posts on the A-B Loop request, still no such feedback.

Good luck to you.

Kwake

kwake · « **Reply #18 on:** October 29, 2003, 11:01:46 am »

Woohoo! After searching the net for a week with no luck, I asked a friend of mine if he knew of an MP3 player that had an A-B Loop feature and he found one: Muzicman!

Surf here for a shareware version: http://www.muzicman.com/

Perfect for learning those tough harmonies or solos!

It is crippled however, in that it stops every 20 minutes or so asking you to click to proceed, but is only 20 bucks to register!

Hope this helps out other musician/artists who will find this prog as useful as I do (even though I'll only need it for the AB Loop feature - MC 9.1 still beats it in overall functionality).

p.s. It has tempo control too...

Cheers,
Kwake

UrfTheWog · « **Reply #19 on:** May 10, 2004, 11:58:07 pm »

Will this ever be a feature? I still use a Winamp plugin which works great but I'd really like to see this incorporated since it's a must have for musicians.

GHammer · « **Reply #20 on:** May 11, 2004, 05:50:01 am »

Quote from: kwake on October 29, 2003, 11:01:46 am

Woohoo! After searching the net for a week with no luck, I asked a friend of mine if he knew of an MP3 player that had an A-B Loop feature and he found one: Muzicman!

Be VERY careful with that app and it's need to write to your files.
When I last used it, I spent a bit of time undoing things it did, and the biggest drawback to me was that it looked at file times to determine if a file was 'new'. You use any other app to tag or whatnot and Muzicman will import the new file for you.

All in all, it looked good at first use, but in actual use it lasted about 2 weeks on my system.

I did like its ability to assign a single track to multiple albums.

Your mileage may vary!

IanG · « **Reply #21 on:** May 11, 2004, 06:35:02 am »

It's not ideal, but you can define loop regions in the media editor.

Ian G.

urlwolf · « **Reply #22 on:** May 11, 2004, 09:20:01 pm »

I use JetAudio for exactly that purpose: tempo and pitch control!
I also proposed that to JRiver, but they answered that it is pretty difficult to implement in the current engine.

Let's hope for the best...

Matt · « **Reply #23 on:** May 11, 2004, 11:28:08 pm »

Check it out -- there's an experimental Tempo & Pitch DSP for MC available here:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=21398

kwake · « **Reply #24 on:** May 12, 2004, 03:54:13 am »

Any chance someone will give an A-B Loop plugin a whirl?

UrfTheWog · « **Reply #25 on:** May 12, 2004, 07:10:48 pm »

I've used the Media Editor and it works well enough except it's much more laborious. Just looking for maybe two buttons - start/stop to make things much easier. Maybe I'll check out the SDK when I get unemployed again (which will probably be soon).

With all the kazillion options MC provides (which is great BTW!) I would think they would feel pity on us poor musicians

bedessy · « **Reply #26 on:** May 12, 2004, 08:52:12 pm »

I installed it but i can't find it. I see it in the dsp plugin- manager, but other than that I dont see it in DSP Studio to give it a look see. Does MC need to be restarted after I install it .

A picture would help alot.

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Who would like to see an A-B Loop in Media Center 9.x?

Author Topic: Who would like to see an A-B Loop in Media Center? (Read 5055 times)

nila