Trim a WAV and cut a loop to the beat

Trim it#

1. Drop the file on the box above, or open seance and press Load audio.
2. Drag across the waveform or the spectrogram to mark the part you want. The status line shows its start, end and length.
3. Press Bounce WAV (Ctrl E). A link to the new file appears; click it to save.

With nothing marked, Bounce WAV saves the whole file, so it also turns an MP3, FLAC or OGG into a WAV.

Cut a loop that lands on the beat#

seance reads the tempo of the file and lays a beat grid over it. With Snap to beat grid on (the magnet, or S), the edges of your region jump to the nearest beat. Turn on Loop selection (L) and press play: the region repeats, so you hear the seam before you save it.

Change the speed like a turntable#

The Varispeed card slows a sample down or speeds it up, pitch and tempo together, from −15.86 to +3.86 semitones. The buttons jump to 100 %, −3 and −5 semitones, and 45 to 33⅓, the classic trick of playing a single at album speed. seance shows the new tempo next to it, so a loop you cut at 96 BPM and slow by three semitones tells you what it will play at.

What the WAV is#

A 24-bit WAV. For WAV and FLAC files seance reads the sample rate from the file and decodes at it, so a 44.1 kHz sample stays 44.1 kHz instead of being quietly resampled to your sound card's 48 kHz. Other formats are decoded at your browser's rate. The audio suite writes and reads WAV at every bit depth on every build and checks that each sample comes back within half a step of its bit depth.

One setting changes the sound on purpose: varispeed. It slows down or speeds up pitch and tempo together, like a turntable, and the bounce includes it. At 100 % nothing is resampled.