I have a quick question regarding sampling to disk vs sampling to memory. I have a patch for live sampling that I built a while back that constantly records to disk. I’m using peakamp~ to analyse the incoming signal to detect two different silence lengths in the input – short silences are considered phrase points, and their timing information is formatted dynamically in a coll as preload cues for sfplay~ – whereas long silences stop recording one file, send the list of preload cues for the previous file and trigger a new file to start recording.

The main idea is to be able to reference phrases by start/end time within longer recordings for algorithmic playback. I chose to sample directly to disk as I thought this would be a headache if I tried to do this using long buffers… Basically my question (which I realise may be fairly naive) is one of efficiency – is recording constantly to disk like this preferred over recording to memory for this kind of sampling?? Obviously at the end of a session I have a long list of indexed soundfiles – I’m not too worried about hard drive space but was wondering if anyone could see any potential issues with such a sampling method?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts,

Ben