I load in a .wav file, which plays the whole song correctly if I use "tabplay~ 1".

But if I connect a metronome at 44100 times a second to either
a tabread4 object to get a single sample (on the left)
or a tabplay object playing one sample at a time (on the right)
I hear nothing, and pops, respectively:

What am I doing wrong please?

@Faranta For [tabplay~] you are telling it to play from sample no.14 for 1 sample only...... so a "pop".
For [tabread4~] maybe you need to reset the counter..... I cannot see any other reason (straight away) why it should not play.
David

The one on the right is also attached to the counter. I disconnected purely so the screenshot makes sense - I was trying both methods.

The counter starts at 0 (I tried reloading the patch) so I don't think resetting it will help.

Maybe metronomes just can't play that fast

those are good looking graphics, what pure data version are you using? im on debian vanilla and it looks horrible.

for sample playback from arrays, I would recommend using some form of [phasor~] object over a [metro] | [sig~]. Triggering samples in the signal realm rather than the control realm just seems to get better results. Fore oneshot playback, [tof/phasorshot~] is nice. I also really like [xgroove~]. If you are ok with using externals, those objects do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and work very well.

@Faranta haven't used this myself, but here are some examples for a sample player: www.pd-tutorial.com/english/ch03s04.html#id425813