I’ve never been able to work out if referencing smaller audio files as opposed to bigger ones has any advantage one way or another.
laymans terms, What is best performance wise, 200 or so 4 bar clips of or one a piece of audio or that does the whole track ?
Curious. obviously, I appreciate the project footprint and size would be smaller with clips as opposed to stems but is there a difference?
Regards
Toulouse
I bet in under 15 minutes you could build 2 projects that tests this yourself. 
I’d also guess that the results will vary between different computers and your answer will be specific to your computer
Believe it or not, I’ve tried that before i posted this and i still can’t work it out, how about if you don’t know the answer you say nothing instead of a smug pointless reply.
I’m not trying to tell you something pointless. I’m trying to suggest to you that the question you are asking probably does not have any single “correct” answer - most likely it varies based on the configurations of the different computers and what components on each one are more susceptible to I/O bottlenecks.
It’s great that you did try to test it before posting. You might consider that if the results you got were not conclusive, that in and of itself is the answer to your question.
I will just add, if you cut a recording in the arranger, you will have a lot of small parts instead of one long.
The audio file itself will not be cut in pieces but remain one file, only the graphical presentation will be changed and the audio will only play the part of the audio file that is on your screen.
Hope that makes sense.