Flash Memory? What do I need to know.

[blakeAlbion]

I have a lot of wav files on my sd card.
When my "drum machine" loads a "kit" of samples (into 8+ voice playback buffers), it takes a whole lot of milliseconds to load in the sounds.
It's so slow, I could not switch kits while playing my drum machine and be able to keep time. I have to stop my drum machine, load the kit, and then resume playing.

Flash memory seems to be the right solution, but it seems I can only hold... 16M? In flash?
The problem is, that's no more than 2 drum kits.

I would like to be able switch to any number of kits any time I want to. I'm greedy like that. This reminds me of my old rack-mounted emu sampler. 16M, scsi disk, loading, loading, loading... done.

Are there any other reasonable options?

 

[KurtE]

There are some larger Flash chips out there, that support is being added to LittleFS and the like.

Things like: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/winbond-electronics/W25Q512JVEIQ/10244706
Which I believe is 67MB. I believe there is another with 80+MB.

Not sure how many of these are in the released Beta version yet. But if not yet, hopefully soon.
I believe Paul added support for the one I mention here, back in November.

 

[PaulStoffregen]

You could also load the first few hundred samples of many sounds. Then when you need to play, quickly copy those samples to the buffer, let the sound start playing, and hope you're able to get more samples from the SD card into the rest of the buffer before the audio system needs them.