I thought this was a little vague also. I thought it meant that you could load in a less than 10 sec. sample, maybe like 4 bars of beat, which you edited exactly at the beginning and end. If you were to mix it in you could hit the repeat button and it would play back looped. Is there another way?

Well, actually, SSL doesn't have a looping feature like that. It's coming though. The repeat button only repeats the entire track.

as Rebelguy said, you can use repeat feature as a workaround editing loops with any audio editor program. you will have to use wav or ogg files though, because repeating mp3s doesnt work very well when looping (there is a small glitch everytime a mp3 file is repeated).

looping is coming...

The reason for the glitch when using mp3s is that no matter how many times you edit it, it always will write a few milliseconds of silence in the beginning of the file. It's the nature of mp3s

J, isnt the silence at the end of the file?

The space at the beginning and end of the mp3, is actually where the header and data information is stored. It is the nature of MP3's to have that digital silence

In fact, go into a program like sound forge, select the silence in the file, delete it, re-save the file, open it again and voila... there it is again. And it's not an abnormalty of SF, just part of the mp3 codec

Hm, I am not sure if this is correct. Usually the headers are not part of the audio data and thus ignored (why would you play back the header data which isnt even a valid mp3 audio frame?). AFAIK there is only some silence added at the end, cause mp3 frames are not sample accurate, and you cant save a half mp3 frame, only full frames. If SF shows the behaviour as described, it looks very strange to me.

There is always a small silence at the beginning of an mp3.

Hm, I didnt know that. Sorry.

What are the reasons for that silence?

Interesting:
If you decode the mp3 in a wav editor you will experience the mentioned silence, whereas when you use lame to decode the mp3 back to wav there is no silence at the beginning. Looks like a flaw of the mp3 decoders in the DAW's. Or some special treatment from the lame decoder.

Seems like a feature of lame's decoder, for more details (eek! this is some real tech geek talk!) lame.sourceforge.net <- click.

Short: You have 528 samples silence while encoding, and then again 528 while decoding it.

The numbers are correct for lame, but other encoders may have different delays. Reason is overlapping of frames or so, didnt read it thoroughly.