Okay can you two do me a favor... Download this binary and tell me if your experience is different. It's 1.10 with id3lib instead of id3tag. It's likely to have its own bugs because I threw it together in 15 seconds, but it should be good enough to ferret out these dramatic slowdown problems you guys say you're experiencing.

FWIW this version doesn't seem any faster for me, but I wasn't seeing slowdowns in the first place. Of course, I don't have six other things running (TheAmigo), and I have ReserveCache (tfabris) so those two things are different in my case.

Can you guys at least confirm that changing tracks very rapidly is faster in 1.10 versus 1.01? Not like perfect, but in 1.01, changing more than 2 or 3 tracks ahead brought things to an absolute crawl, and buttons became unresponsive, etc. I kinda focused on this since it was a real drawback of 1.01, but I don't want to do that at the expense of performance under normal conditions.