iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Looping Regions

If you install a loop, hit the Home or Z key to rewind, and then press the Space bar to play, you may wonder why you went to all the trouble. The newly installed loop plays once—and then stops.

Fortunately, they’re not called loops for nothing. The first and second illustrations in Figure 25-4 show how you can make a loop repeat (or any region, for that matter).

You can make a region repeat as many times as you like. In many songs, for example, you might want the drums to play continuously for the entire song. You can even stop dragging halfway through a repetition, giving you, for example, one-and-a-half repetitions. That might be useful if, say, you want those drums to stop short halfway through a measure to create a dramatic break.

Tip

When you make a loop repeat by dragging its upper-right edge, you’re cloning the original loop, and the copies remain genetically linked to their progenitor. If you edit the first occurrence, all attached repetitions also change.

If you’d prefer the ability to edit each repetition separately, duplicate the loop region by copying and pasting (or Option-dragging) instead. That way, you create fully independent regions that you can edit independently.