In Hijack, I need an easy way to detect up front whether the new format exists on a player, so I can avoid the time-costly lookups for new-style fids when none exist.. before falling back to the old-style regardless.

Does Hijack stat files that often? The player just looks for the new name first and, if it's not found, the old name. It already has to look in two places for each fid (i.e. each drive); looking in four places doesn't seem to have caused any user-visible slowdown.

Hijack already tries to be smart about which drive to try first, based on where it most recently found a related item. And I'd like it to be smart about this too, if possible.

This is just for the web interface, which when one clicks on a LARGE playlist can take a very long time to generate the page -- completely stat/IO bound while doing so.

I think for now I'll just use a config.ini flag to turn on/off support for the new format, so that plain vanilla systems won't be impacted at all.

This will be out shortly, untested, in Hijack v310.

Cheers