Will lossy compression prevent me from performing audio analysis? I'm starting a project where we will have to analyze bird recordings. We will try to measure the birds activity using the audio.

The recordings are really long (around 24 hours each) and recorded in IMA ADPCM WAV. 
All files are about 1.5GB each. 

When trying to import them into MATLAB, it simply locks up because of the size of the files (I think). So we were thinking about heavily compressing the files to 8KBPS mp3's, which would result in files of around 100MB.

Now I know mp3 compression is based on the psychoacoustics of the human hearing, so I was wondering whether using mp3 compression would throw away data dat would be needed for the analyzation.

If it does throw away data that we would need, what would be the best route to take? Are there other compression techniques that might be better suited to our needs?

Thanks in advance.
I would make a comment (not really sure about it) but I don't have enough rep, sorry (tell me if I need to delete this).

I just wanted to suggest trying to load the heavily compressed mp3s first, because I'm guessing matlab would decompress them to the same amount of samples and may lock up the same.

Also, if possible, I would process the files in chunks and not load them all at a time (I'm guessing matlab has a function to seek in the audio file without loading it all in the memory). You say 1.5GB each, so if there are more than a couple, you may actually be maxing your RAM (if matlab converts from 16bit to float or double, one file could probably max the ram).

Last thing, I'm not sure if you mean 8 kylobytes or bits per second. I'm pretty sure 8 kilobits per second is not gonna produce anything remotely usable.

Again, I would have made this a comment because I'm not really sure about it, but I can't :(