I hear the pause occasionally. Not on every track, but enough to be able to watch what happens and when, if there is a glitch.
I just did a listening test again and watched the disk and network activity. My temp directory is on my OS SSD. I had a backup of one hard drive running to another hard drive at the time, so one hard drive was maxed out. CPU stayed below 20% with no significant spikes. All this other activity seemed to have no effect on the occurrence of the glitch. This was on my Workstation so not the PC in my signature. A 2010 era PC, but still a powerful PC.
I have "Disable audio buffer to disk" unchecked. Audio prebuffering at 6 seconds. Internet speed 55 Mbps down, 5 Mbps up, latency 9 to 16ms. Ping to
www.radioparadise.com ~190ms. No memory playback. Gapless. Playing to Realtek High Definition Audio (WASAPI) Exclusive, 100ms buffering.
As far as I could tell, the glitch happens not when the download starts, and not when the disk activity happens, but just before that when there is send activity on the network. I would guess that is when MC sends a request for the next track to Radio Paradise. I was almost able to predict if a glitch would happen before the download or disk activity started, based on whether the quick network send completed without a glitch occurring. The process is quick though, so my predictions weren't 100% accurate. Also, sometimes the send happened at the same time as some other network activity. Possibly even the track download, which seemed to start immediately when the send happened, rather than shortly afterwards.
So maybe look at the code that is requesting the next track Bob.
PS: I did start to look at what was going on using Process Explorer, but by the time I worked out how to detect and capture a glitch, Process Explorer decided to crash. I might have another look at it later. Maybe someone else might try using Process Explorer to zero in on the cause.