Marcus & Dan,
Thank you very, very much for the detailed information!
Dan: That's exactly what I thought when going into this at first. But, I decided to give gzip a shot just to see how well it did. Turns out that (at least for bursty environments) it almost halves the size of the original file. It should be noted that the file was in fc32 format so there were likely a lot of unused bits there (or so I guess).
Marcus: I have been giving thought to truncating some of the bits. Going as far as thinking about dropping from sc16 to sc8. I have worked with 8 bit sample files before and had plenty of success demodulating, so I'm thinking that it might be an okay path to go down. Dynamic range goes to hell, but it it's worked in the past... I think that re-packing as 12 bit would give considerable space savings without a lot of CPU overhead. I'll have to give that one a go :) I really like your idea of using FLAC. Just a quick Google search netted
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/compressing-filtering-iq-data/. What concerns me is that when I tried to use the command line flac in Ubuntu it said that the sample rate must be between 1 and 655349 Hz. I'll have to poke around at it to see what happens when I set an incorrect bit rate (maybe a multiple of will be fine?).
Thank you both!
-Dave