======Read Speed Test====== The following terminal output shows the difference in processing requirements for 24bit little endian and 32bit float wav files when loading from the disk. This is a strong indicator that we should ALWAYS keep our wav files in 32bit on disk to enhance disk streaming. time ./test.out test_24le.wav real 0m13.421s user 0m9.944s sys 0m3.464s time ./test.out test_float.wav real 0m4.410s user 0m0.376s sys 0m4.028s The code: #include #define N 100 int main(int argc, char*argv[]) { for(int n = 0; n < N; ++n) { SF_INFO sf_info; SNDFILE *fh = sf_open(argv[1], SFM_READ, &sf_info); float samples[1024]; while(1) { sf_count_t r = sf_read_float(fh, samples, 1024); if(r < 1024) break; } sf_close(fh); } return 1; } The files used were ~200MB