@andrewvonpelt My impack plugin will load GIFs, via its image.xload() function. The example that comes with it shows this off, using a (free) companion plugin.
(Disclaimer: this and another plugin or two probably need some iOS maintenance. I’m hoping to finally get around to this and some bugfixes before Christmas, since then I’ll probably not have a Mac handy for a while; optimistically, I’ll get on it next week.)
oh this is great thank you. Does it support play/pause on Gifs too? or does it load them and just automatically start playing them in a continuous loop?
The aim of this part of the plugin is just to read the raw byte data out of image files. Thus the companion plugin. 
(That one basically gives you a fill that you can populate with bytes.) You can just drive it with a timer, as seen in the sample.
never was documented, and even harder to find now that the old blogs are all broken, but:
fe, i used it to modulate pitch/volume per-frame of a looping ‘engine’ sfx
Yeah I’ve found these, but I’d love this to be official if I would use it. I can handle smaller undocumented stuff I know I can easily work around if it’s removed at some point in the future but if I kind of rely on pitch setting and it would go away or not reliably work in the future, it would be hard to work around the problem.
But there’s the point of improved audio features on the roadmap for Q1/2018 so I hope that it’ll become an official feature/API sometime next year