On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 11:02 +0200, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
david lemarechal wrote:
Hi List,
I have to play simultaneously 8 large soundfile (about 30min at 44,1kHz/16bit, e.g. about 70 Mb each in wav format) on 8 different outputs.
I use readsf~ on Windows but audio drops out at every disk access (when the Disk Acess LED of my laptop blinks), and of course this occurs very frequently... I can hear about one minute without drops, then it occurs at a fixed frequency (which I didn't calculate exactly).
I tried to load each files with a long delay, tried to defragment, nothing change. I tried to change the bloksize flag, and the arguments of readsf~, with no luck.
make the buffer for readsf~ HUGE (like [readsf~ 2 1e8] or so) make the audiobuf in pd as big as possible. make your harddisk as fast as possible (reorganize it; buy a new one) if you have enough ram, you could also consider using a ramdisk.
oh and: do the 8 soundfiles have to be played independently? or is it really just a kind of 8track soundfile (split into 8 mono files). if so, i would _highly_ suggest creating one big 8channel interleaved soundfile and play that one instead of 8 separate files. your harddisk heads will be thankful for not having to move from one file to the other every block.
i don't think that there are "better" soundfile players out there (there are soundfile players with more (and less) features; but in your case they should behave very similar or worse).
we have been using [readsf~] successfully with 24 channel soundfiles without any dropouts.
i can confirm that (though i tested only with 16 channels), but the first thing i'd do, is to test with another multitrack-software, if your system is the bottleneck or if pd is the cause of these problem. personally i don't trust pd too much on windows. i had once a similar problem on windows, which might be related: when recording 8 or more channels with [writesf~], one or more soundfiles were empty afterwards (44 bytes to be exact). this was only on windows. i tested on the same system under ubuntu and everything worked well. we solved the problem then by using the pd-core from pd-extended, then it worked also on windows. it could be, that this issue is completely unrelated to your problem. but at least it could be interesting to know, that there _are_ cases, where pd is the source of the troubles and not a slow harddisk / too less ram etc.
roman
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