If I have 10 sample players, but only need 8 note polyphony what would be the best way to use the 8 tables more efficiently? Am I right in concluding that using 8 soundfilers, arrays, tabplays is the most efficient way to create a 10 sound sample player? Will the reading of the file be fast enough that you will hear no apparent difference between the sounds already loaded into memory and the ones that need to be loaded and played at once?
you need 10 tables if you want to preload 10 sounds. (unless of course you put multiple samples in a single table and then use offsets...etc,...but that's pretty pointless, probably)
you only need 1 soundfiler, and you can just use different messages to that to send the data to different tables
for 8 note poly, of course you need 8 separate tabplay~ objects
if you playback with either readsf~ or tabplay~, your sound would be 100% exactly the same, unless you have audio dropouts caused by overloading your machine, or unless you change the samplerate or something when loading.