multichannel audio file keeps stopping
Hey everyone,
I’m trying to play and control a multichannel audio file containing six channels, but after a few seconds it just stops playing. It’s a rather long recoding and large file with nearly 4Gb. I’ve read in another (quite old) forum post, that Max might only be able to handle audio files up to 2Gb, so I tried to spit the file into two sub 2Gb files with three channels. It still stops, but keeps playing a bit longer.
I’ve tried it with mc.sfplay and playlist. When I load the six individual channels I don’t have any issues. Loading all six channels individually and putting them into my target patch killed my performance quite a bit, which did not happen with a multichannel file. So I'm trying to get mc to work.
Has anyone an idea, why the mc files might stop?
Since Max 8.3 we no longer have the maximum size limitation. Is your file an encoded format or is it uncompressed (wav,aif...)? Do you have the same problem when you load it into buffer~ and play with groove~ or play~?
Hey Olsen,
thanks for your reply. It's a .wav file, but I also tried .aif. I'm not really familiar with the buffer~ object, but if I use that with mc.play~ it dose not stop, but I only get one channel. How would I get all six channels from the buffer~?
[polybuffer~] or 6 [buffer~] objects.
Hey Jean-Francois,
thanks for your reply. I'm trying to read a multi channel .wav file (and there is the issue, that it always stops after a few seconds with mc.sfplay or mc.playlist) If I have to use six buffer~ objects, one for each channel, I could just read the six mono files directly. I'm trying to avoid that and get the mc pipeline to work.
I don‘t really understand, why the multi channel file wouldn’t play and hope that someone, more experienced than me, might have a solution.
You have to initialize the playback object with the buffername and number of channels.
I’ve tried that, but mc.play~ just plays the first channel on all channels. Maybe I did something wrong.
Here is an example patch with the included mc sample:
Could you maybe tell me what I did wrong?
I think you want mcs.play~
or mcs.groove~
btw mc.play~ and mc.groove~ work in a different way. You can set the output channel nb with an int after the buffer name and @chans <int> defines the number of channels per output. So you created an mc.play~ with first channel duplicated 8 times in your example.
Still your original question remains unanswered. why mc.sfplay~ stops playing your multi channel file?
Since you're using a 8-channel [buffer~], maybe also look at [play~ name 8] or [groove~ name 8].
What about sfplay~ 8? As far as I understand, mc.sfplay~ @chans 8 should be the same as sfplay~ 8 -> mc.combine~
Cool, thank you both so much!
This seems to work now!
Olsen, yes right, my 6channel .wav file still doesn’t work with mc.fsplay as it should…
But I think one of your and Jean-Francois' suggestions should work now. It’s possibly even better. I need to load the same 4Gb file twice and I guess it might be more efficient using buffer~ instead of two mc.sfplay objects!
I just posted about a similar issue: https://cycling74.com/forums/25ch-files-not-playing-max-multichannel-mc-playlist~
Only for me built in players work great with up to 16ch. Then I have similar issues with 25ch or more.
" Still your original question remains unanswered. why mc.sfplay~ stops playing your multi channel file? "
Did anyone seem to find an answer for why multichannel audio keeps stopping playing? I am encountering this same problem when playing back a 25 channel wav file using playlist, sfplay, and mc.sfplay.