Today, I realized that simple playback of an audio file just isn't that easy in pd: since I was unable to find an mp3 player that actually works on a win 2k/xp system, I chose to leave the files in .wav and read them using tabread~ or tabread4~ driven by phasor (I need more control than the readsf~ object can provide). Here's the weird thing: as this method works fine with files up to ~10 minutes, longer files seem to decrease in quality as time goes by, and around 18 minutes,it sounds really bad (a little like beeing processed by a "bitcrusher" ...for those who like cubase, something very "lo-fi"). I find this to be very intriguing and was wondering if anyone out there had an explanation for this, I was also wondering what other solutions I had to be able to play long wav files without quality loss. Thank you all.