Multiple sounds playing at once - how?

[Karl Becker]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to get multiple sounds to play at 
once using MetaCard 2.4.3.

I currently use the play command (play audioClip, specifically) to play 
AIFF sounds.  I had used the play videoClip command in many past 
projects, letting my file size be smaller by using QuickTime 
compression codecs to compress my sounds, but I just found out when 
developing my golf game that playing a video clip introduces a 
significant stutter of the MetaCard engine both when I start and finish 
a "play videoClip" command.

I would love to just have a few player objects and have them play for 
different things (one for the bounce of my ball, another player for 
crowd noise, another for the line judge, etc.), but whenever I have 
even one player object in my stack, my stack seems to degrade pretty 
bad over time, eating up more and more and more processor.  That's just 
with even one player.  Even with one player right away, it just seems 
to eat up a huge amount of processor - and this is on a relatively 
speedy 800 MHz G4.

Anyone have any ideas for me?  Any way to reproduce (easily) the 
soundchannels of HyperCard?

(apologies for bringing up HyperCard  ;-)  )

Thanks,
Karl