and it's been proposed that the player will read the actual *1 FID if it gets requested

Yeah, but at the very least the player would have to keep a few tracks ahead (and probably behind) cached up already, because if it didn't, and it goes to read the *1 FID when the disks are spun down, it'll cause a very noticable delay.

Still a good idea, though, as keeping the entire player database in memory is a very large pain for those who want to run user applications in the leftover memory space.