or maybe, remove the comments from all the tracks, and put the record label in the playlist ID3 tag, that way you only have it once in memory, and not multiple times for each track in the playlist?

Either way, with 12mb of memory, and a 70gb drive of MP3’s. It’s going to run into memory problems I’d think. I remember the empeg guys saying they didn’t use anything over a 30gb drive in their personal empegs.