Are you sure that what loops correctly is the whole audio file, rather than a certain portion between loop points that are lost when exporting? You might have to explicitly delete bits of silence before exporting.
Are you sure you haven't set options in Logic to add silence at the beginning or at the end, to add a fade in and/or fade out effect, or to pad file length to some block size used in MP3 encoding? If the sound loops properly in Logic and it has silence after export, there's no other place to look.

Of course, both saving from Audacity and test playback in Quicktime Pro might alter the presumably repaired audio file in the same ways.

Let me make sure I understand what you're doing:

You're creating then bouncing out a MP3 file in Logic.

You're bringing it into another DAW (in this case Audacity), cutting the silent gaps, then bouncing it out again as a MP3 file?

If so, then your issue is trimming the gaps in another DAW then bouncing out just recreates the same gaps. You need to use a MP3 trimming program which subtracts the gaps but still keeps the MP3 format. As far as I know, Audacity doesn't do this, but I could be wrong. To test the clip, I open it up in Peak Pro (you could use Logic though) and loop the playback ensuring that you're only playing back the file's exact length. It may take several tries to get it perfectly seamless but it is possible. The key is a specialize program that removes the gaps.

Thanks,

Nate

Hey Keith!

This is a problem that I've encountered many times.

To add to what Nate said, don't ever open a mp3 edit it and then save it again. The only thing that will happen is you'll add another gap and compress the compression.

I've yet to see a software that manages to create seamless loops from mp3 (although if somebody finds one, please tell me). Mp3 adds about 25ms of silence at the beginning. Now the problem here is about 25ms. If it was a fixed time then the programmers could have solved it easily. Just skip the first 25 ms, right?

Being in production doesn't give you much time to investigate but from what I found, this is the best explanation:

http://www.compuphas...p3/mp3loops.htm

MPEG 1 Layer 3 (MP3) stores a sound clip in frames of 1152 samples and all frames must be full. When you take an arbitrary clip, it is unlikely that it has a multiple of 1152 samples and encoding it into an MP3 file will therefore probably result in a final frame that has "silence" padding up to the next multiple of 1152 samples. Even if the original clip has an exact multiple of 1152 samples, many encoders append another frame of silence as "padding".

These days I basically accept the gap or use another encoder. If you're producing for iOS I'm sorry to say you don't have that many options

If the people who are developing the game are using Unity 3 then you might have an alternative. They claim to have fixed the looping issue but I haven't had time to try that either. Then again, if you use Unity why even go for old and grumpy mp3-format anyway?

The last alternative that I know of is FMOD. The tool is horribly non-intuitive and you have to pay for the license if it's a commecial game.

Cheers

//Henrik