How to create a custom starting point?

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen!

This software is awesome and I want to thank everyone involved!

I was trying to recreate Dr. Dre's Still D.R.E. and have managed to create perfect loops. However, the song itself begins with a cello sound, 4th beat of the loop. How can I break the loop and place only this 4th beat in the beginning of the song? I have tried adding an automation track that mutes everything and plays the cello at the end, but it takes too long to get to the 4th bar. I'm very confused and out of options. Any kind of help or suggestion is welcome and would be appreciated!

Thanks and have fun!
kbar wrote:
Mon Oct 12, 2020 6:38 pm
Hello, ladies and gentlemen!
Hi, Welcome to the Forum kbar !
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How can I break the loop and place only this 4th beat in the beginning of the song?
I think the solution is to use the loop-markers
https://lmms.io/wiki/index.php?title=So ... op-control
You would in song-editor set the loop start at end of 3. beat in first bar, and the loop-end at song-end. That will give you a working-space that correspond to your wish.
Alternatively you would need to calculate the speed of the cello part, as a fraction of the main part, and make a whole bar in higher BPM, for the cello, but that more technical :)
Thank you for your suggestion! I'm going to try that.

I created two separate tracks: one plays the cello, the other is an automation that mutes it until the 4th beat. Later, I came up with another solution that includes cutting the first bar and moving other pieces. It's rather tedious, however. I, too, thought about playing the first bar faster, but I don't like it much.

Alternatively, the first three beats can be cut in Audacity, but that's kind of like a post-production thing.

Does exporting respect the loop points or it plays the whole composition regardless? Because I want to export the whole thing.
kbar wrote:
Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:40 pm
Does exporting respect the loop points or it plays the whole composition regardless? Because I want to export the whole thing.
Oh yes, that is the neat thing!
Lmms has a great feature: Export-between-loop-points, so from any sized project, you can select any piece of continuous blocks, and export only those.
We have discussed options for fragmenting a project, for export, but so far that is only vapour-ware, so only one continuous block, can be exported in one go, but it is of cause fully possible to export several loop-point-framed pieces, and then use Audacity to stitch everything together, in any way you prefer
Alright, thank you very much!