Clip looping

A clip can repeat itself. Drag the grip above its top-right corner and the clip extends by whole and partial cycles of its current content: a two-bar drum phrase fills five bars, a four-chord MIDI loop runs through a verse. There is still one clip and one selection, so moving, muting and trimming act on the whole run, and editing a MIDI loop’s notes changes every repetition at once.

When to use it

Loop a drum pattern or a bass line under a section instead of copying it eight times. Repeat a recorded riff to try an arrangement before committing. Loop a MIDI chord cycle and keep refining the voicing while the whole section follows. When you want independent copies that can diverge, duplicate the clip instead.

Controls

The grip

Hover near a clip’s top-right corner, or focus the clip from the keyboard, and a round grip appears partly outside the clip, away from the fade handles. Drag it right to add repetitions and left to shorten them; Alt or Shift bypasses snap. On a touch screen the grip is always visible. With the grip focused, Left and Right change the duration by one grid step, Alt by one source frame or tick, and Enter or Space add one more cycle.

The cycle

The first drag captures the trimmed region as the cycle, including any silence inside it. Later changes keep that cycle, so a loop stays the same length however far you stretch the placement. Resizing the right edge of a looping clip keeps its cycle too; trimming the left edge or splitting preserves where the source phase falls, so a split loop keeps playing the same thing at the same bar.

Right-click the clip and open Loop. Repeat once more adds one cycle. Duration sets the total placement precisely, in seconds for audio and in beats for MIDI. Return to single pass ends the clip at the next cycle boundary and stops it repeating.

MIDI loops in the piano roll

Opening a looping MIDI clip shows one cycle, marked Loop source. Draw or move notes there and every repetition updates. Notes that cross the cycle’s end stop there and start again where the next cycle needs them; a sustain press that spans the boundary stays held across it.

Fades and repeats

Audio fades run over the whole placement, not per cycle, so a fade-out drawn on a looped pad falls at the end of the last repetition and moves when you extend the loop.

Tips

Audio repeats at its recorded speed. Choose a region that ends cleanly on the grid; there is no tempo detection or seam crossfade, so an off-grid loop clicks at each repeat.
Repeat seams are drawn as thin full-height lines and a badge counts the cycles, so a loop reads differently from a row of copies.
Rendering or gluing a looping clip prints every repetition into ordinary material.