In reply to:

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You would have to leave enough free space on the disk to unzip the files and in my opinion this would be a waste.

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Not so - gzip is a relatively simple task and if you're decompressing straight into memory, or in this case a DAC, then it takes up much less processor time (which goes into writing file system structures and so forth). You can use it as a pipe. I've had plenty of times where I've used gzip | grep | more and it works faster than I can scroll the text even on .1% hits.

Besides, gzip is not good for compressing files of words larger than 8 bits - there's too much related information between the two bytes in a 16-bit word for gzip to get good compression. I'm working on an open lossless compressed audio format that encodes the left and right channels separately and uses 16-bit words rather than 8-bit. I have no code for it yet but stay tuned.

As soon as I get my hands on a copy of Delphi...

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.