Throttling the amount of CPU Media Center uses for audio playback would be nice.
The old method of playback where it was only trying to fill a small ~30MB buffer quickly, rather than ~1GB was a lot easier on the CPU, though there was still a large spike of CPU usage at the start of the track - it just didn't hit 100% on my system.
In MC19 with or without memory playback, there's a big spike of 100% CPU usage that can, ironically, interfere with playback causing it to skip at the start/end of a track.
I find that it really interferes with other applications running on the system too.
Since the upgrade to MC19, I cannot play SACDs in the background when playing a game for example, as it causes it to stutter every few minutes.
I'd much rather return to the small ~30MB buffer of decoded audio - maybe even smaller than that.
I'd then like to cache the files in RAM. Either the whole ISO where possible, or if I'm playing another format like FLAC, something like the current track and the next two tracks.
Other than caching SACD ISOs, it would use less memory overall, reduce CPU usage, and make Media Center immune to disk access again. (as long as it can cache the next track in the next 6+ minutes rather than the ~20 seconds it has now)
Rather than Memory Playback On/Off, I'd like to see separate options for the Playback Buffer (decoded audio) and File Cache. That way people can choose for themselves whether they want to store the entire track as decoded audio in RAM or load the files into RAM and decode during playback.