Audio Of 2! Bar Loop Out Of Sync

Ok. What I see from your picture are a couple of problems (even the one bar loop has an “error’). They are not difficult to understand, but not that fast to explain. I’ll try my best. (Sorry for the Menus being in Italian in the screenshots, but I think you can understand anyway where things are)

First of all, let’s start from what you already noticed. This is due by your loop containing a sound that continue after the one bar is finished. Therefore Studio One, while importing the audio files, doesn’t get the tempo in a correct way. You can see it by right clicking on the audio file:

This can be “fixed” easily in a couple of ways: you can change the info of the audio file here on the “right click menu” by telling it the right File Tempo for every file you import or you can disable the tempo timestretch, for a single track in its track inspector or for the whole song, in the menus or when creating the song.

First method is better: you’ll have to do it every time you import an audio file, but at least if you’ll need later to use timestretch, you’ll still be able to do it.

You can easily test that the culprit is the sound continuing after the end of the pattern by creating a simple pattern without any of those. A simple Kick Snare Kick Snare for example will export just correctly, with the audio file being of the exact length and the File Tempo detected appropriately.

And here comes the second problem that you probably haven’t noticed yet: if you export something that continues sounding after the defined number of bars end, the audio file created will be longer than the amount of bars (in your first audio file the waveform ends in the first bar, but the audio file is 2 bars long). That’s because the last sound exceeds over the second bar mark.

All of this leads to an even bigger issue: exporting something like this, if you want to loop it also in Studio One, the sounds “exceeding” will always be interrupted. In some cases it’s not a big problem, but if you think about a sustained guitar note at the end of the loop being truncated you can see that this is not the desired behavior.

To avoid this, there is a better solution for exporting loops: telling Maschine to optimize the exported loop to contain also the tail of the sound.

This must be done in the Export Audio Menu under File. You don’t have to export it from there into a folder, just chose the option and push close. Once you set it up there, also the drag & drop export will follow this rule.

This is probably also why in Cubase you don’t notice this problem: it import the loop truncating any tail and creating the loop of the exact number of bars. But it will not sound correctly.

The only problem with this is that the tail of the sound will be “baked” at the beginning into the exported audio.

Therefore if you want to have the first “cycle” without the tail (e.g. at the beginning of a song) you will have to export also a version without the sounds that have a tail (maybe by deselecting the Loop Optimize and using the first method in this “mini tutorial”). You put this first audio file where you want this part to start and then after this one you put the second audio file with the Loop Optimize that you can then loop as many times you want.

All of this or you just record in Studio One by routing the Maschine output an audio file which is already long the whole song to avoid all these problems 😂😂😂

Or you already arrange the whole part directly in Maschine.

But if you want to import an audio file in Studio One and be able to manage it later, this is the way.

I hope the way I explained things is clear enough. And don’t worry: once you’ll see how to do it, doing it will be way faster than writing it down 😉