Peter, are strings shared in the database?

No

In other words, if I have ten tracks from an album with a really long name, will I get ten instances of the album name stored?

Yes

Or will I get ten (shorter) references to one long string?

No

(Yes, I know I ought to RTFS, but I'm lazy, and you or someone may know the answer)

Part of the problem is that RTF (Emptool) S lets you find out the database format used on the player -- i.e., we can't change it (make it more efficient) without breaking Emptool, Emplode, and JEmpeg. It's been sort-of on the todo list for a while to separate the player's database (that it uses while running) from the one visible to Emptool/Emplode/JEmpeg. This would also allow other information (e.g. original pathname) to go in the externally visible database without it clogging up the one used by the player. But that's way post-2.0.

Peter