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.