Considering giving up Tracktion - no more than 24 2496 mono tracks realtime playback (BUG)

[metamorphosis]

There is a bug/feature in the core audio streaming engine of tracktion
which stops it from playing back more than 24MBPS off an HDD - ie. more than 24
tracks of concurrent 24-bit 96khz audio files (not synths) - in realtime.
It is present in all versions of tracktion, and I've tested it on both a
WD raptor hard drive (10000rpm, 75000MBPS random read) and an SSD
(150000MBPS random read),
on two machines (a pentium 4 3ghz with 2GB ram, a e8500 dual core
with 4GB ram, both XP SP3, good power supplies and motherboards).

Comparatively reaper and others don't even max out at 70 of the exact same
tracks running concurrently.
It doesn't matter what the speed of the hard drive is, how much ram is
available, whether windows has /3gb enabled, whether large system
cache is set etc etc.
For both the WD raptor HDD and the SSD HDD tracktion gets dropouts & the exclamation mark after the 25'th track is enabled

I actually bought the SSD with the idea of working around this
limitation, then found the hard drive speed wasn't actually a factor. Originally I just thought tracktion was crap at buffering audio, but now it turns out it's an internal limitation.

So now I'm considering giving up tracktion. I'd still use it for most work, but eventually I need something which can handle more than 24 tracks of concurrent 2496 mono audio - my projects have outgrown that already.

I would be interested to see if the same thing occurs on other people's machines, but having now tested it on two machines, one with the fastest HDD possible, I feel certain this is a core bug in tracktion, and not my setups.

To test you will need to get 26 *different* tracks of 24bit 96khz audio on the same drive, line them all up in tracktion on separate tracks, mute all but 16, start playing, then slowly start un-muting and see what happens.

If anybody has a different experience, please let me know and post your setup details here-
Cheers,
M