[PD] note data record / playback

[greg]

Hello I have two questions:  what are some strategies for capturing
specific live pd data into pd to reuse it later?  I'm sort of
visualizing something like a buffer of some arbitrary length of time
provided by the user, then perhaps "on the one" you could re-trigger
and / or save this loop.
also:  What are ways to load store and play non-audio loop data? 
ideally this could work from small one-off files similar to audio
loops.  
Sorry if this is an RTFM question, but the pd universe is vast and maybe
someone has done this before.