You can stream music. You cannot stream effects; the timing of effects is such that you can't afford a frame's delay or people will notice it's off-kilter. And, as it happens, effects are precisely what are loaded uncompressed; almost every game engine's streaming-music feature uses MP3, OGG, or whatever.

But it's entirely possible that you could decompress some of that audio into RAM beforehand if you're not confident every device can play that audio compressed immediately. Or store back a cache file temporarily. Or just not even worry about the CPU because the vast majority of users are GPU-limited rather than CPU-limited.

Flash storage is cheaper than it's ever been, and my time means more to me than it ever has. If I could spend a few dollars to have more gigabytes of fast storage, that sounds like a bargain.

I don't know about you, but I have better things to spend money on than storage that could otherwise be slightly further compressed. I'd rather wait a couple seconds longer and burn my money on upgrading the graphical fidelity of my machine.

Better yet, I could buy 3-10 games on Steam on sale for that money. Do you still think that's a worthwhile upgrade? Or would you rather wait another 3 extra seconds for every level reload in your game?

If you have more money than time, you could always disable compression. My problem is that I can't enable any sort of good compression and I'm broke.

3 seconds extra between levels, plus 20 seconds during the initial engine load, plus 5 seconds closing down the app, etc...Time adds up. If I've got half an hour available to play a game, I want to get in+out fast. My SSD can stream data faster than my CPU can decompress it. Why would I want to handicap the hardware that I paid good money for?

On the other hand, 15 years ago, I remember shifting data around to fit on my 20GB hard drive, doing the minimum install and running games from the CD to save disk space. My priorities would've been a lot different, then.