Hi Guys,

I've been working on a rather ambitious Pure Data project for a while now, but I'm having a few difficulties, particularly with playing samples.

I'm using a lot of samples for a generative music piece and all I want to do is just trigger them and get sound, so I've simply used {open /Users/jackdale/clips/exampesample} then readsf~ and trigger the samples with bangs to the open message box.

It was working quite nicely, however it's quite a large piece, sometimes I'm getting nasty audio drop outs and it seems to be when multiple samples are being triggered at once.

Has anyone experience similar problems? I'm considering downsampling to half the sample rate using block~ in a subpatch then upsampling again with block~ in the patch containing the original subpatch (with an outlet~). This is because I've heard the problem may lie in that pd cannot load the samples as fast as it's requested to play them. Is this the right way to go about it??

Alternatively would loading all the samples into RAM be a better option?

Thanks in advance

Jack

@Jack_dale RAM is the answer..... . If you have a physical hard disk then the initial disk access is (most likely) the problem, and even with an ssd there is an "access time". Once the track is playing readsf~ will be receiving chunks of data into ram and playing from there, but at the very start of the sample the hard disk has to go and grab the header and the first chunk of audio data for each sample from different places on the disk.
It is possible....... I don't actually know...... that sending the "open" messages to [readsf~] once a sample has stopped........ and then the start message when you want it again might work (it might have pre-loaded the first chunk)..
If any of your samples are longer than 40million elements (907 seconds of 44.1 mono) then you have to use [readsf~] for them anyway...... due to the table limits for 32bit data in Pd.
You could cut such a sample into parts though......... and play them sequentially from ram using the right outlet of [tabplay~]
David.

Thanks a lot David ill give it a go!