...could you somehow? I have some quite long wavefiles and I would prefer to not load them as tables.

Not directly. But you can specify an onset in samples in your [open path/to/filename.wav (here)< message which will enable you to [start< playback from the desired time (in samples).

For pause/resume functionality you could have a line~ keeping track of file position. Perhaps using soundfiler to get the scale correct...

@cfry You can pause using [switch~] ..... and [line~] to stop clicks....... as when audio processing is suspended for the window the file read is paused.
cart_wav_simple.pd
The start delay is probably unnecessary on a modern computer.
David.

@whale-av

Thanks! I actually started to think about switch~ later on.