I am using a few gong and bell sounds in something i am doing. These are audio files that are maybe 4 or so seconds long. I am putting the audio file into a soundfiler object, then into an array. I am doing this because I am playing the file back at different speeds.

I am getting this error in the console:

warning: I'm saving an array with 440100 points!

I guess my method is eating up a lot of ram or something.

What would be the best way to use this file so I can play it back at different speeds, but not eat up a lot of RAM?

Thank You. Nick

I guess my method is eating up a lot of ram or something.

Well, loading sound files into memory is going to use memory, but that's not what the message is about.

FWIW, 441000 32-bit samples = 441000 * 4 bytes = 1764000 = about 1.7 MB, so a few such files would consume a few MB. In modern computers, this is nothing to be concerned about.

I believe the warning relates to the "save contents" checkbox in the array's properties. If enabled, it will write the array's data into the pd patch file... in ASCII decimal format, 9-10 bytes per sample. This is really inefficient. Usually you don't want to do this for audio arrays. So it tells you, "hey btw, you're getting piles and piles of audio data written out as text into your patch, are you sure?" and then you have the opportunity to right-click on the array and uncheck the "save contents" box.

Usually you shouldn't see that, though, because soundfiler should uncheck that box for you when you do "read -resize":

"warning: array array2: clearing save-in-patch flag"

So I'm not sure how you're ending up with the box checked (unless you saw the "clearing save-in-patch" warning and manually went to Properties to re-check it).

Anyway if you're loading audio from a disk file, then there's no point in saving it in the patch. Save-in-patch is good for small arrays where you don't want to have a separate file for the data... but you already have a separate audio file. Hence "save-in-patch" + soundfiler is only wasting CPU time and disk space.

hjh

Thank you for that information. I have like 40 arrays with soundfiles in them and all of them were checked with the "save contents" option. I just unchecked all of them and it made the warnings go away.

Thank you so much for the information. I just learned something new!

Take care. Nick