Lossless audio support

I've raised the idea of lossless audio file (flac, wavpack, even lossless WMA) support on the Mulch list before. For archival purposes and to save disk space I store mulch wavs in flac, and it's a hassle having to flac -d them whenever I want to play an old Mulch file.

The counter argument then (which I think is still valid) was that support for lossless audio would mean extra processing for Mulch during playback, which would have a significant performance cost. This is a sensible point. However, I don't see why, when loading an amh file, Mulch couldn't

a) decompress LoopPlayer audio into the appropriate format Mulch uses in memory; and
b) decompress FilePlayer audio into a temporary folder.

Obviously there would be a performance penalty when loading the .amh, but none during actual playback.

Additionally, it would be useful to have an extra option with the Save a Copy with Sound Files functionality whereby you could choose to save to a single zip or other appropriate archive format containing the compressed files and .amh.

I often email Mulch files to another Mulcher for collaboration and this would be very useful, rather than having to compress and zip the files manually each time.

And of course it would be useful to be able to load such a zip file into Mulch directly.

I don't think this is a terribly urgent problem, but for managing tracks archivally over the longer term I think these options would be extremely useful.

Thanks

Stuart