skaller wrote:

> On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 06:58 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> > That file
> > is:
> > 
> >     96000 * 60 * 60 * 8 * 4 bytes => 
> >     11059.200 Mbytes =>
> >     11.059 Gbytes
> > 
> > Nobody is going to load the whole of that file into memory at once. 
> 
> Why not? That's tiny compared to available address space on a 64
> bit machine, and personal computers have heaps
> of free address space

Ok, so someone writes a simple application that loads the whole file
into memory and then plays it. Unfortunately disk transfer speeds being
in the order of 100 Mb/sec means that its going to take 110 seconds to
load that file. Thats bad!

Obviously, the smart way to do it is to stream that file off disk 100kB
chunks at a time. Thats what libsndfile is designed and optimised for.

Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who 
go by guesswork and ignorance." -- Erik Naggum