Quick question: how is Activity Monitor being used to make this conclusion?

Oh, yes, that makes sense, not in the last place to avoid memory fragmentation. I'd like to run some tests on this. Would it do to start loading a large file with a low chunk size, then immediately try to read from the end (which shouldn't yet be loaded)? When should these chunks be loaded at all? Is this affected by advancing time only or perhaps when the UGen graph has cycles to spare at the end of a block? maybe it's affected but SndBuf's .pos() and .rate() (considering the last may be negative if we'd like to play the file backwards)?

Right now this might be of a lot of use to me too so I'd like to spend some time investigating whether there is a issue here and, if not, exactly how we can make the most of this feature. What should prober behaviour be?

Not that, like, ChucK has never had a bug or anything... just want to make sure we're not chasing shadows.

That sounds sensible, yes. Ok, then it's on to phase two of the "blame ChucK, ask questions later" process. :-)

Kas.