I've created and edited most of the wav files in Cool Edit Pro and saved
them as 16-bit PCM wav files. When I try to >play them using readsf~ I get a "Bad header" error in PD's terminal window.
Remember to uncheck the "Save extra non-audio information" checkbox when you save files in CoolEdit. This may solve your problem. Changing the filetype to Apple .aif format will probably also solve the problem.
And using soundfiler, I can read small-ish files into an array but
the -resize flag fails when I try to read longer files (approx >3 - 5 minutes).
The soundfiler have a size limitation of about 16MB, since samples are loaded into memory (to prevent overflowing the memory?). To break this you'll need to edit d_soundfile.c in the sources line 798 and recompile. (This worked for me once).
HTH Soeren