Additional comments from Jesse Rolland from another request that I'm moving here:

"Ok so basically having full control over setting a “loop-in” point and loop duration (# of measures) is really desired right now. At the moment we are limited to only being able to loop one measure at a time and have to open up a measure individually to view it and loop it. Being able to loop any # of measures and play/practice along is absolutely crucial. I’m actually very surprised more people have not put in a request for this. It’s just really limiting right now when I can’t input a region of my Beat as to where I want to loop and for X amount of measures. I’m really hoping users will vote for this feature. Below are the settings specifically (they go hand in hand together):

Loop In-Point: A setting within the looping settings box to choose which measure to start loop point.

Loop # Of Measures: A setting within the looping settings box to choose the # of measures to loop.

Loop On/Off Switch: A Button in the settings box to turn the loop brace on and off.

Ultimately these settings could fit inside the current box/window with our current looping settings. With that said these new settings would have to function separately as the loop brace button would essentially turn off the other settings when activated and vice versa. Also it would be ideal for the settings currently activate to be lit up like in white and the settings not activated to be greyed out. Hopefully all of this made sense!"

Originally from: https://roadmap.beat-note.app/feature-requests/p/loop-bracemultiple-measure-settings

Hi @Jesse Rolland and thanks for your contributions to the Beat Note roadmap! I'll reply to each one individually to address the feedback you've raised. 👍🏻

The looping features in BN have been added incrementally over the past few months - and you might be interested to check out this reel on IG where I share some of the feedback and design ideas contributing to this feature: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cv0JoCsIGxM/

I absolutely want to continue the evolution of this feature to include setting the loop end point, as well as some other features that users have requested for additional practice support, such as auto tempo increase and choosing beat partials to loop (e.g. from the middle of measure A to the middle of measure B).

The evolution of the feature originally started with just looping the entire beat, then adding the ability to loop each measure, and then adding the ability to choose the start-from measure, so the next natural step in the evolution is to allow the loop end point to be set as well. The biggest challenge I've found thus far with this is how to allow the user to set this in an intuitive way.

You mentioned a "loop brace" and moving it around manually. I would compare this to the loop braces in an app I often use called "Mimicopy" which allows a simple drag-and-drop ability of the loop start and end markers for an audio file. The difference here, though, is that for Mimicopy, the entire song visualization fits on the screen. While the iPad offers quite a bit of screen real estate to work with, the iPhone screen is a lot smaller, and I worry that a loop brace will be challenging to drag to the appropriate location for long beats.

I've also considered enhancing the settings screen, but the challenge I found with this is that there's no easy way to show the context of where in the beat the "end point" would be. Even if the music was shown, a really long beat, such as a song transcription, might have many measures that look the same.

The other solution I've considered is the same as choosing the "start measure" by adding another option to the long-press gesture to set the "loop end." I think this is maybe the most user-friendly option, as you would have context of where you are in the beat. It might look something like the following screenshot. What do you think of this approach? 🤔