Keep in mind that iTunes had already done the hard work for Winamp. iTunes has to walk your directory structure, open each file, and read the ID3 tags. That tak

Keep in mind that iTunes had already done the hard work for Winamp. iTunes has to walk your directory structure, open each file, and read the ID3 tags. That takes real, actual time, especially on a spinning disk. iTunes is probably slower than it has to be, but there is a limit on how fast that sort of thing can be. Parsing a single XML file takes a lot less time. It took a lot longer than 2 seconds for me as well - about 16k songs.