hi,

I put together a guitar effect patch to play live into with an added 3 track recorder.

I anticipated that pd isn't really built to function as a DAW, but I only needed some capability to sketch things out, so I've only been using approx. 15 second length arrays.

even still, when I try to save a patch with recorded material, however short, it takes forever. something like 5 seconds for each second recorded.

the sliders I've got to set the array length can go up to 60 seconds worth, but that would be completely unusable. opening a patch takes a while too, but it's saving that's really slow.

I read on this forum that using tables is faster, and it seemed to work perfectly, but it seems you cant save data in a table, even though the graph inside, does have a "save contents box" when I reopen a patch, the recordings are gone and the box is unchecked with the graphs back to 100 samples.

anyway, is there any way around this? thanks a lot in advance!

How about saving the audio to .wav files after recording, and then reloading it as needed?

You can do this using [soundfiler]

that would make sense, was just checking if there's a way to save in the patch using tables that I didn't know of since it's a simpler operation

i don't get it.
why don't you save each array with

;
array-name write path(

?

Using the write message for arrays saves them as text files, which are larger than audio files. With text files, each element in the array has to be saved as a string with (if my understanding of programming is correct) a set amount of digits--usually eight (I'm not actually sure what Pd uses). Each character in a string is 8-bits, so 8*8 gives you 64 bits of data per element. I think there might be another 16 bits for the "0." that goes before those eight digits, but don't quote me on that. So that gives you possibly 80 bits. A 32-bit sound file will, of course, use only 32 bits per element, and with better accuracy, too.

saving arrays instead of wavs can be handy with smaller wavs because it keeps it all contained in the .pd file. i've also done it for some patches where moving between linux/windows filesystems would break the in-patch save/load patching. handy sometimes but for the most part save/load setups are the way to go.