We'd need to look at licensing issues (libflac is LGPL, so that shouldn't be a problem). Also, we're kinda in feature-freeze for 2.0, so something this big would have to wait until after 2.0-final, probably. It also needs to be prioritised and scheduled.

This might be a worthy feature to consider. If your 5:1 compression holds true for music as well as text (unlikely, I know) and as cheap as hard drive space is today, a lossless compression option could be viable. No more worries about VBR vs CBR, Lame vs Xing, what bitrate to use, how much audio quality is being lost in the encoding, etc.

I think with my present encoding (Xing, VBR, high quality) I am probably averaging about 12:1 compression. I think I wouldn't be too upset at using three times the disk space to have lossless compression, but of course my music collection is relatively small, it currently uses only about 8 GB on my player, and at least 2 of those GB are .WAV copies of my IASCA tracks.

So, yes, I hope that you will give some "prioritise and schedule" thought to this idea.

tanstaafl.