Make a Repeating Audio Loop in Audacity

Mike asks, “I have a 7 second heartbeat audio track. I want to make it a 5 minute track. What is it called and how do I do it?”

What you’re describing here is what’s commonly referred to a looping an audio track. This is frequently done with a section of audio that’s either repeated for a few times throughout a musical composition or a loop might be used to create a bed for an entire segment of music. The actual implementation varies slightly depending on which audio application is used, but the basic premise is the same - you figure out how long the piece of audio you want to loop is (7 seconds in this case) and then you establish how many times you need to play a 7 second file to achieve 5 minutes of continuous playback. I’ll walk through the process of creating a 5 minute loop from a 7 second track using Audacity, which works for Windows, Mac and Linux.