RAPID SEQUENCE of audioclips on a Mac

[J. Scott Saults]

I want to thank both Scott Rossi <scott at tactilemedia.com> and Geoff Canyon 
<gcanyon at inspiredlogic.com> for their separate suggestions (in Mon, 7 Jan 
2002, use-revolution at lists.runrev.com)  regarding how to try playing a 
rapid sequence of sounds in Revolution. Although I really appreciate your 
efforts, neither procedure seems entirely adequate. My initial tests, on a 
mHz mhz Pentium 4 computer, seemed promising. However, the same scripts on 
a 250 mHz G3 Apple Mac were way too slow and erratic. Unless I'm missing 
something (I'm open to suggestions & corrections), the timing of the onsets 
of the sound clips, using either Scott's or Geoff's method, critically 
depends on how long it takes Revolution to load and begin playing a sound 
clip, after the play command is executed. A fast Pentium seems just about 
fast enough to (usually) play 250 ms sounds at about 4 sounds per second. 
But the Mac I tried is not even close. The onset-to-onset times were 300 or 
400  ms or more, and furthermore, erratic and unpredictable (using either 
method). It might help if there were some way to reduce this latency 
(loading and playing a sound) and/or make it more regular and predictable 
so some kind of correction could be incorporated.

If I can't do this simple task, then I may be wasting my time and money on 
Revoution. I really hope someone can help me work around this apparent 
limitation, even if I have to use external commands to do it.

Perhaps (hopefully) I'm misunderstanding something about the methods 
suggested by Scott and Geoff.  As soon as I can, I'll take a closer look at 
my implementation and tests of Scott's and Geoff's suggestions to see if 
I've made any mistakes.. I'm still new to Revolution, and I know it has 
features and capabilities that I'm not yet familiar with using. Surely 
Revolution can do this (play a rapid sequence), considering that I could do 
it well enough using HyperCard on an old Mac II many years ago. Or is 
Revolution/MetaCard really deficient in this regard?

Thanks again for the help already offered, and for any additional 
suggestions anyone would like to share.

Best regards,
Scott Saults