*This* is a good point and worth noting, not necessarily as a "always delay before playing" sort of thing but more a short description of how it works, then a note like "if you experience occasional dropouts on first accessing a file, consider adding a small delay after opening but *before* playing."

On Mar 4, 2024, at 1:01 PM, pd-list-request@lists.iem.at wrote:

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2024 12:55:54 +0100
From: Christof Ressi <info@christofressi.com>
To: pd-list@lists.iem.at
Subject: Re: [PD] help making sense of [readsf~]
Message-ID: <2176516f-edbe-4982-bcfa-b7002952abc1@christofressi.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"

Actually, I forgot something important:

Of course, the worker thread must also *open* the file! If the file is 
not yet cached by the OS, this can indeed take a few milliseconds.If you 
don't add some delay between "open" and "start", you might notice that 
you get a dropout the very first time, but not on subsequent times.

In fact, if you don't wait between "open" and "start", the perform 
method almost certainly blocks. However, often we don't notice because 
it may be "absorbed" by Pd's own ringbuffer (= "Delay" in the audio 
settings).

Anyway, I agree that the help needs some more clarification! (Just make 
sure you really understand how the object works before changing the help 
patch :)

?Christof

--------
Dan Wilcox
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com