why the heck would you cache the entire library of tags? I mean, I understand the performance issue for seeking on artist, genre, etc, but many of the tags are NOT used in the empeg player.

Correct. Which is why (if I'm reading this thread correctly), the player only actually caches the data it uses.

You have to realize that when we use the word "tag" we are not necessarily referring strictly to ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. We sometimes mean "The data in the player database that was extracted from the tag information at import time".

See, the player doesn't actually use the ID3 tags at all. Emplode just peeks at them to get its database data when you drop the files onto emplode. After that point, it only uses its internal database. So your MM volume leveling data is ignored by emplode and is not eating memory in the player.