The delay~ object creates a "ring buffer" into which it constantly records the signal coming in its left inlet. The first typed-in argument specifies the size of the buffer, in samples. The second argument (or a number in the right inlet) specifies how many samples in the past delay~ should look for the signal it will send out its outlet.
A stereo spatialization effect can be achieved using x,y coordinates to determine intensity and delay for the sound at each speaker at each moment. The hypothetical listener is placed at a point equidistant from the two speakers. The speakers are each assumed to be at some angle from the listener between 0 and pi radians, with 0 radians being straight to the right, pi/2 radians being directly in front of the listener, and pi radians being to the left.
To delay a single bang message by a certain amount of time, use the delay object. But to delay any other sort of message—a number, a list, even a group of different messages—use pipe. The pipe object dynamically allocates memory as it stores more and more messages, so it can keep track of many messages at once, even if they arrived at different times and have different delay times (unlike the delay object, which can only hold one bang at a time).
There are many objects available for delaying events (i.e., for scheduling events to happen at a specific future moment). For timing and scheduling events, the most common object is the metro object (send bang periodically at a specified time interval), which can be used to trigger events, start/stop entire processes, or trigger a counter to step through a table or a coll or any sort of sequence of things.
This example demonstrates creating a RAM buffer to hold a 10-second stereo recording, recording live audio into it (with input volume adjustment), and then playing randomly chosen backward clips of that sound, with a trapezoidal window to taper the beginning and ending of each clip to avoid clicks.
This abstraction encapsulates delay, gain control, and stereo panning in a single object that can be used in some other "parent" patch. It assumes that its first inlet will be connected to a tapin~ object in the parent patch. That tapin~ object will send a tapconnect message when MSP audio is turned on, thus linking the tapout~ object in this abstraction to the memory buffer of the tapin~ object in the parent patch.
Audio delay is achieved by creating a buffer in which the most recent past sound can be stored. Usually this is called a "ring buffer" or "circular buffer", because when the buffer is filled (with, let's say, the past one second of sound), it loops around and begins refilling itself at the beginning, thus overwriting the sound that was stored more than one second ago.
This patch demonstrates the use of the abstraction in "Abstraction for crossfading between delay times". It requires that you have saved that abstraction with the name delayxfade~.
This example shows my preferred method for changing between different fixed delay times. It's an abstraction that I regularly use when I want a simple delay, and want the ability to change the delay time with no clicks or pitch changes. It's designed as an abstraction so that it can be used as an object (a subpatch) within any other patch.
As you get more involved in programming audio, it's likely that you'll want to have multiple sound possibilities available in your program, that you can switch on and off as needed. You might want to take a look at MSP Tutorial 5: Turning signals On and Off to learn about some basic ways of doing that. However, that chapter leaves out the following pretty crucial issue.