As I understand soundfiler is pretty limited, so it would be interesting to load long audio into multiple arrays tabread~ can play afterwards. Is it doable? Maybe soundfiler can read part of audio file with start/end positions?

@Transcend It can be done of course.
I had a stab at it ages ago. In extended it worked well, although I complicated matters by wanting a visual display of the complete waveform for scrubbing with a cursor, so it took a while to load a long file, and I had to be careful not to save the patch with audio loaded.
I had a go at converting to vanilla as well, but never really finished that.
Someone probably has a simpler and better solution, but you might find something useful in this......waaav.zip
David.

@Transcend which version of pd are you using? Since pd-0.49:
4 million point default limit on resizing soundfile read to array changed to 2^31-1 (about 2 billion) samples.
http://msp.ucsd.edu/Pd_documentation/x5.htm
You can use the -skip flag to read from different start positions

@whale-av

1. readsf~ works fine with long files, no complaints, but yes, I sometimes want to scrub those long files, so. . . . this why I'm looking for arrays
2. I can't get rid of that nasty "... couldn't create" for iemlib, that is installed in standard path

@solipp

3. Pd version 0.49.0
4. In the documentation you referred: "it (soundfiler?) still reads the samples only to throw them away". I think this is why ~12 min array is only half filled, i.e ~16 million samples form ~32 million are visible.

@Transcend yes, it will throw the samples away if invoked without an array name. Sometimes you just need the information, like samplerate etc.

The samples are not visible, yet you can still read them. I guess that's an issue with the tcl/tk gui.

@Transcend iemlib/soundfile_info from extended will work with 32-bit Pd Vanilla but not with 64-bit.
It is a standalone executable so you could copy it into the patch folder.
Here it is for windows....... here.zip
It could be copied out of a download of extended for your system.
Looking at it again I see I had tried inputting the soundfile info manually. But there were other problems to solve with the vanilla version so I never moved on. Probably "loadbang" timing issues (the usual headache in big vanilla dynamic patches).

I had built it originally just to see if it could be done, but it's a lot easier just to use a DAW.
Extended exists as a portable zip file (run anywhere) if you are using windows and want to see it working ......
http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended
David.