No doubt, I'm someone who would have said that the .WAV files would decrease somewhat the time needed for regeneration.

If PG Music now says that this is not the case, all I can say is that something has changed since we were given the answer several years ago.

The original explanation was as you said, that the compressed .WMA file first needed to be uncompressed. This was the reason PG Music provided the Uncompress command in the RealTracks menu in Preferences. Doing the uncompress did not improve the quality, and took almost 10 times as much space on the hard drive, so there would have been no good reason to do it unless there were some benefit, and that benefit was slightly faster speed of regeneration. [This command is no longer present in version 2013 for RealTracks. In RealDrums, it is still there and is called Install.]

As for what drive to run them from, I placed the RealTracks on an internal 10,000 RPM hard drive. I then deleted the ones I know I won't be using. The supplied PG Music hard drive is the backup.

BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.