Sample Editing - Extend a short tone to infinity.

Say you've got a little sample or tone in a wave file (like an 'aaaahhhhhhh' for example, or maybe a long note) and you want to extend its length without timestretching, changing its pitch or making it sound looped. What could you do in a basic wav editor?



Here is a tidy way of extending samples seamlessly:

Select a part of the tone that variates very little i.e. it has a constant sound which doesn't change in volume, pitch or have any distinguishing features.

Select a suitable portion of the wave file that fits this criteria and cut and paste it to a new file.

In this new file we are going to fade out both the start and the end of the wave - we're talking the start of the first peak and the end of the last trough. This basically ensures that what you do next is clean and doesn't pop or click when it is looped.

Copy the whole waveform.

Paste the copy onto the end of the file so that you have two next to each other.

Reverse the part that you just pasted at the end.

Now you should have a wave that has doubled in length and plays forwards then immediately backwards. Like this:

You can now loop the whole thing and it should sound continuous.



I do this a lot with things like cymbal crashes, guitar notes etc etc and its a great way to stretch samples without runing the sound.

Even if the sound isn't as smooth as you'd hoped, you can still use it lower down in the mix and add other layers on top of it to create a sound texture.

You can even have a sound start, loop the middle part in this way and then let it play out at the end.