Hello,

Since nobody answered the "[wavinfo] equivalent for aiff files?" question, I suppose the answer is "no".

If so: what do people here do to determine whether a soundfile (which could be aiff) is mono or stereo? In other words: what's the most efficient way of querying an array for non-zero? Are there any useful command for this, or do I have to iterate through the array?

I would think something like [iem_max], or maybe something else from the iem_tab library, would be be the quickest way to determine if the array isn't constant zero.

@dhk said:

Hello,

Since nobody answered the "[wavinfo] equivalent for aiff files?" question, I suppose the answer is "no".

yeah, that's what i guessed. i'm afraid to answer 'no' these days cos i'm really out of touch with how far pd development has come.

@dhk said:

If so: what do people here do to determine whether a soundfile (which could be aiff) is mono or stereo? In other words: what's the most efficient way of querying an array for non-zero? Are there any useful command for this, or do I have to iterate through the array?

well, not JUST that, but if you're planning on being able to re-load audio files into slots that have been used before, then you also have to send a [const 0( message at least to the right channel array, or otherwise it will still contain data from the previous file.

however, you've actually got another pd glitch on your side here. pd doesn't have a threaded soundfiler, so you're going to get a glitch when loading audio. this happens regardless of whether you just load one audio file, or whether you first zero your array, then load an audio file, and then iterate through the right channel to see if it's mono.
so, unless you're dealing with really huge audio files, or have a particularly slow processor, then it's probably not much harder just to do the iteration to check.

or, of course, you could do what i do, and just never use .aiff files in pd.

Thanks for the answers.

Although I'm in a project which is very restrictive wrt including externals, I would like to check out iem_tab. Where can I get it? I already use pd extended, but iem_tab is listed as "unsupported" on puredata.info.

I'm making a sampler for use with Macs, so excluding aiff is not something I will do with a light heart.

I've tried briefly an iteration method which is [counter]-driven, and it doesn't really work – it gives up after a few hundred iterations with a stack overflow message. Slowing the iteration down with a delay works, but has the side effects of either slowing the sampler usage down (for long samples) with using >= 1 ms delay, and/or risking a cpu usage burst by using, say, 0.001 ms delay. Sample loading is done by folder, so several hundred samples (including layers) may get loaded and iterated through at the same time...

I'm considering a dirty solution like combining a periodic sample check (100 for each sample, maybe, evenly distributed) with maybe 100 random checks. Not 100% waterproof, and still a potential cpu burst with many samples loading simultanuously. Any other ideas?

iem_tab is included in Pd-extended. Just [import iem_tab] to get the objects working.

Also, iirc, the main difference between .aiff and .wav is (well, was) the endianness. The older .aiff format were big-endian like the old PowerPC processors. Now that Macs use Intel processors the endianness doesn't matter. The current .aiff format is little-endian just like .wav. There's no longer a real advantage to using one over the other.