Question

There’s an AudioFileOpenURL function which opens an file. With AudioFileReadPackets that file is accessed to read packets. But one thing that stucks in my brain is: Does AudioFileOpenURL actually load the whole monster into memory? Or is that a lightweight operation?

So is it possible to read data from a file, only a specific portion, without having the whole terabytes of stuff in memory?

Answer 1

Does AudioFileOpenURL actually load the whole monster into memory?

No, it just gets you a file pointer.

Or is that a lightweight operation?

Yep, fairly lightweight. Just requires a filesystem lookup.

So is it possible to read data from a file, only a specific portion, without having the whole terabytes of stuff in memory?

Yes, you can use fseek to go a certain point in the file, then fread to read it into a buffer (or AudioFileReadBytes).