Wav's would free up CPU as you aren't not decoding much on the fly, however the drawback is increased disk access. So check out performance on your actual machine.

Would you find firewire 400 fast wnough to access files on external hard drives. I'm particularly interested in using a Glyph Gt Series Hot Swap Hard Drive System for Files. As far as I know, they are not firewire 800 compatable yet. Thanks for your thoughts

Dylan

i am using AIFF and WAV files with a LaCie Firewire 400 drive and SSL runs smooth for me!

Firewire drives should be fast enough, I would worrie more about disk fragmentation, other filesystem related stuff (indexing tools etc.) or retries on the disk causing slow downs of the data rate.

Get sysoft sandra (if you're on windows) and benchmark your disk system.

I used the wave file when I first got the SSl.Wave's are 5 times as big as MP3's so I got a lot of clipping and stoping and analyzing going on when I used it. I have 1.2 ghz amd. I woulnd't use waves unless I had the fastest laptop made.

It's likely to be less the processor speed and more the disk speed. As mentioned, playing a WAV actually takes less processor power than playin an mp3, but much more disk bandwidth. Many laptops don't have great harddrives, hence the problem. Using a fast desktop disk in an external enclosure with firewire or usb2 should help a lot.