[xMissingno]

I would love to be corrected on this - but my understanding of frequency compression is that you have to decode the entire file before being able to play back the audio. Therefore, in real time applications with limited RAM (video games) you don't want to wait for the entire animation to be decoded before streaming the first frames.

Can anyone think of a system with better time-to-first-frame that achieves good compression?

[nmacias]

most audio and video schemes support streaming, in the case of MP3 we are talking about frame-based compression

I guess to restate my curiosity: are things like Animation Pose Compression in Unity or equivalents in other engines remotely as good as audio techniques with hardware support? The main work on this seems to be here and I didn't see any references to audio codecs in the issue history fwiw. https://github.com/nfrechette/acl