Way to speed up the loading of game music?

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Merx

Hi all, just incbin'ed some extra music tracks to my game for the release version, only to find that the 'delayed' loading process now takes nearly a minute to load incbin'ed .ogg music tracks (6 tracks totaling about 18 Mb in total avg 2Mb) via the LoadSound() method.

So is there a way to speed up the loading process e.g.

Is loading from external file faster?
Would zipping up the tracks speed up the initial loading?
Could I use a thread to load the music in the background?
Would another format work faster?
Is there another approach to this that would work?

Any and all help welcome!

Regards

Merx