The seam is a discontinuity, not a “mood”

When a file ends mid-phrase at −12 dB and the start opens at −1 dB, the DAC jumps. Your ear reports that as a click, a pop, or a tiny gap if silence was padded at either edge. Seamless looping means removing that discontinuity at the sample level before you care which app will play the file.

Three failure modes people confuse

  1. Amplitude mismatch — end and start sit at different levels (most common “click”).
  2. Silence padding — encoder or export left 20–80 ms of near-zero at the tail; repeat sounds like a hiccup.
  3. Reverb / delay tail cut short — room wash is still decaying at the cut, then the dry attack restarts; ambient beds show this hardest.

Crossfades in a DAW can hide (1) and (2). They also smear transients. For beds you want to reuse, leveling the true splice (or regenerating a loop that already meets) is cleaner than stacking fades in every project.

Manual path (DAW) vs automatic splice

In Audacity or any DAW you zoom to zero-crossings, nudge the region until the cycle sounds right, then export. That works; it is also slow when you only need a background bed. Loop Music runs in Chrome: drop the file, click Create loop, and the extension searches for a workable splice and levels the seam. You get a file that any “repeat” button can use.

When you actually need a one-hour (or eight-hour) file

If the destination supports looping (OBS Media Source, most NLEs on the timeline, many web players), keep the short seamless file and let the host repeat it. Build a concatenated multi-hour WAV only when the upload target forbids looping and insists on one continuous asset — sleep uploads and some stock sites are the usual cases. The seam still has to be clean; a long file with a click every 45 seconds is just a longer problem.

Quick checklist before you ship

  • Listen at the loop point on headphones, not laptop speakers.
  • Confirm there is no trailing silence in the exported file.
  • Prefer WAV when the next step is another edit pass; use AAC/MP3 only for final delivery if size matters.
  • Do not re-trim the loop ends in CapCut/Premiere after export — a new cut recreates the discontinuity. See the CapCut guide if that is your editor.

Still hearing a tick? Read how to loop audio without a click sound for diagnosis by symptom.