Polybuffer~ memory usage (2x of actual file size?)
So I'm doing some stuff with large numbers of samples and I'm wondering if there's a way to load samples into Max that doesn't take up twice the amount of memory of the samples themselves.
Basically I have a corpus which I'm loading into polybuffer~ that is made up of around 1700 4-channel files. The files themselves are a total of 6.75GB. When I load them all into a polybuffer~, polybuffer~ tells me:
Memory Usage: 13.50 GB
At the moment that's ok, but it's starting to push up against my available RAM limit, and I plan on working with much bigger corpora as well...
OR am I misunderstanding what polybuffer~ is trying to communicate to me?
Aren't buffers stored as 32 bits float? If your files have a 16 bits resolution then I see some logic.
So the buffers always go up to 32-bit floats regardless of the source audio file?
I vaguely remember something about that many years ago (with something like Alex Harker's [ibuffer~] being a workaround).