Blog - ✂️ - 22 - Snipping At Audio

22nd August 2025

I finally found a tool.

-=-=-

I spent all day yesterday, trying oodles of different Audio Utilities, trying to find the right one for the big job ahead.

The task at hand is to go through ... ALL my music.. And flag a few loop points in every single one of the tracks.
The theory is to have 4 sections in every track, if I can find suitable points.
An Intro, an A Loop, a B Loop and an Outro.

The plan would then to have a new loopable MP3 function in both Browsercade and JSE.
The basic PlayMP3 command would go from Intro to Outro without changing anything, then loop back as it usually does.
The enhanced version would let you do something like PlayMP3("This Track","IntroAABAABABOutro")
I think..
If that even sounds right when you try to do it!!!
Maybe I should just stick to a basic loop, instead?

I'll try to get through a few tracks, write a mini tester, and see how it sounds, I think.

..
So, anyway, back to finding those loops.
I tried Audacity, GarageBand, Logic on iOS (and then instantly cancelled THAT subscription!)
I also tried Reaper and Amadeus Pro..
And they all seemed to have the same quirky set of issues.
One frustratingly hard-to-find thing is "Mark a loop, but jump to the end of the loop before playing so you can hear the loop point"
A LOT of the tools seem to be of the "You hit start, so I'm starting at the beginning of this 2 minute loop, and you WILL listen to it ALL!!!! EVERY TIME!!!" mindset.
Which isn't very good when you've got *checks* A LOT of music to go through!!

CoolEdit would've done it, but I'm on MacOS, now, and try as I might, I can't seem to get ye-olde CoolEdit playing nicely on the system.

The Chatbots got involved, and at one point I was even working with Gemini to see if we could build a suitable tool, but with HTML based issues getting in the way, I kinda gave up trying to do that. It's really hard to zoom and scroll around a waveform that doesn't look like a very good waveform in the first place, when the browser keeps going "Oh, you want to zoom into the page?" every few seconds..
(Though a lot of that might be MacOS Beta issues)

So, I gave up with that and went back to Claude, where I waffled on about my complications, and wishes that CoolEdit was still around*. Claude eventually asked if I'd tried "A DAW like maybe Ableton?"
And I went.. "Hmm... Would that work?"

Claude talked me through how to load the MP3 "properly", remember to turn off the Warp, set the tempo, but also drag out the start of the MP3's object in the editor, because Ableton seems to cut off the start for reasons I'm not quite sure of.
.. Good call, there, Claude!!

So I tried all of that, and having wasted the whole day trying to find the right tool.. ... It looks like I've found the right tool. Hurray!
And it was sitting on the drive the whole bloomin' time.

See, the chatbots aren't all that bad!

(Maybe ignore the fact that the various Chatbots got me to install a dozen or so different audio apps to get to that point, though!)

You can Test a loop here..
It should hopefully loop cleanly enough, though the drum trying to sneak in, then get pushed out, is a little quirky! Let me know if it at least sounds as though it's keeping time, correctly in your browser/system of choice.
As always, leave thoughts in the comments/Discord