Re: Proper way of using Sphere?
Reply #12 –
Looping music, in particular mp3, has it's issues because of how the format is designed. The fundamental problem occurs because of this:

You can read further into that if you want
here, and while there are ways around it for mp3, it's flaky. Some engines like Unity can get around it by accounting for the delay and padding programmatically/doing processing on the music file (this is more like what Rhuan was saying with changing the position).
To get looping working for music, the best way is to render it into .ogg format and then test how it loops in a good audio editor (eg: Audacity [it's free]). If the music should be looping well, but there's a seam or click at the looping point, then you have to go down to the sample level of the audio file and make sure it starts and ends at the 0 volume point. With monotracks you can do that by cutting off a few point samples, but with stereo tracks the easiest way is to fade out the music over the last few sample points and fade in the first few.

In the above, it can't cut be off correctly in stereo, so instead fade it out over the last 6 samples. The 6 samples here will only last 1/10 of a millisecond, so it won't be noticeable to the listener and should get rid of the click sound.
From there, in sphere, you should be able to play it with repeat as true and it should loop just like in audacity.
If however, you're talking about more precise looping like, pay this part and then start looping this part, then you'll either have to do it in code by playing the first part and then fading in the loop when it should start (as two separate files would probably be easiest here), or maybe using a tracker format like .mod (more limited in terms of what it can do, but does have more complicated looping options). I'm not sure if .mod is supported in miniSphere though.