Most compression formats have blocks and their lengths commonly fall into a few tens of kilobytes range; they can always be made smaller (which usually causes s

Most compression formats have blocks and their lengths commonly fall into a few tens of kilobytes range; they can always be made smaller (which usually causes some loss of compression ratio). Decompression can then proceed one block at a time, so you can decompress in a streaming fashion. At the same time, most compression formats are very unsuited to starting decompression from any other point than the beginning of the stream. I don't know how easy it is to seek in FLAC files, but to my best knowledge it's at least possible.