I rolled my conversion back to medium to try to reduce the gap between songs, but it's still pretty evident. A little NUC is serving it up, so conversion certainly isn't speedy, but I think in this case the wifi is the limiting factor. If Panel was requesting a bit ahead that would help.
Different LAN - Wifi on a plane is pretty slow...
Is there a way to do this from within an MC client? For a specific playback (album, playlist, etc), request a converted version, vs streaming FLAC? I know I can change that on the server, but I wouldn't want to change it for all clients, or even this client later. I looked around, but didn't see that as an option inside of MC so I went the Panel route.