Indefinite loop with intro

[TheYormLad]

I've made an arrangement, and I want to have the main body of the song loop indefinitely, and I also want to have an intro that isn't part of the loop. How do I make it so that I can export as mp3, set the render length as long as I like, and know that the intro will play only at the start and the body will loop for as long as it needs to?

[scg]

I can't think of a way to accomplish that directly. That would require the rendering process to be loop-aware in some way, which it's not as far as I know.

There might be a way to do it with some sort of plugin, e.g. a real-time sampler (like Crossfade) or a delay with 100% feedback. But, the plugin would have to be able to accommodate the length of the looped section, and there might be other issues with that approach as well.

[dsu]

In session view the clips have a start and stop marker and a loop marker.
This video shows you where they are and how to adjust them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfXceaeTouo

For example you have a 6 bar clip. 2 bars of introduction and 4 bars of repeat.

Set the start marker at the beginning of bar 1 and the end marker at the end of bar 6
Set the loop marker at the beginning of bar 3 and the end of loop marker at the end of bar 6

Now when you start the clip you get a bars 1 and 2 played once and bars 3 - 6 played in a loop.

Clips in session view have this capability. Clips in arrange view do not.

You would need to render out the mix you have in arrange view and then load the resulting file into Session view and configure as noted above.

[TheYormLad]

Came here to confirm I worked it out. Did it in session view, intro has Follow Action into the first scene of the loop, which has Follow Action into the next, etc. Final scene has Follow Action back to the start of the loop, leaving the intro out. Thanks to the others for their suggestions!