Hello. We have prior art for keeping beginnings of samples in memory for instant play in context of multitrack audio. People have also written jingle players which keeps the start in memory and loads the rest from disk.
My first Linux program (at 1995) was a sample player which with I could assign samples to keys and play the samples by pressing the keys --- by pressing a key multiple times, the same sample was played with multiple instances (i.e., the previous instance was not turned off). The design was also to keep beginnings of samples in memory, and read the rest directly from the disk, but I just were not able to implement it with my programming skills. No public documentation either.... Best regards, Juhana
