Loop Point Identifier by DaggerMouth at 2:06 PM EST on December 20, 2018
I'm looking for a piece of software that I don't know exists. I'm after something that when fed a WAV file can find the loop point, or if no guaranteed point is identified, point to the most probable locations for manual identification.
As an example, I'd like to be able to feed it some looped file (ie. BRSTM) converted to WAV with at least one loop using vgmstream and for it to identify where the song starts playing repeated data. The program's actual use won't be for cases where the loop information can be easily obtained, though (perhaps USF is a better example?)
As I said though, I'm not sure something like this exists but if any group of people have an idea, it's the hcs forum!
The issue with sequenced loops is that the audio samples are not aligned perfectly with one another post-loop in every circumstance, meaning software like this may fail to catch anything since other samples will fall out of sync. Another issue this software may pose is that it may try to loop something prematurely if it repeats a section that sounds exactly the same. I see something like that being more useful for manually looping something that has already been looped before since the audio post-loop will be exactly the same as audio before it; however, those cases will almost always have the loop points lying in plain site just by using foobar2000 and looking at properties.
While I could see it being effective in some circumstances, usually those situations will similarly be super easy to just do manually anyway. The more difficult things to manually loop would be more likely to get passed up by this software. For that reason, I don't really recommend it, even if it exists. It probably takes at least as long to just verify it got the loops correct as it does to just do it manually in the easier cases.
EDIT: And as far as sequenced loops are concerned, they tend to loop a bit before they would ideally be looped as a streamed file. By converting a sequenced loop to a streamed loop at the exact repeating point of the sequence data, you're cutting off some of the 'aftermath' audio from the end of the loop and tacking on different sequenced audio that doesn't belong. Ideally, sequenced to streamed loops should be done a few seconds later, meaning there's no 'correct' loop point for those if that makes any sense. As for streamed files, just use foobar2000.