Slow on the uptake

Ok. I presume other people have a similar problem to me with their iTunes. It takes about a minute to shut down. This is, of course, because it’s rebuilding the music library, which it a pair of files; one XML and one binary; which contain all the information on the music I have; play counts and the likes.
Maybe it’s my slow hard drive; I don’t know, but it’s really irritating. I only have about 22,000 songs in my library. My addition rate is about 1 album a week (there’s nothing good out there). The biggest update is the play counts.
Suggestions for performance improvements. Make the binary file be a bunch of binary files. One file contains the file information, one contains the individual song information, one contains the play information, and then one per playlist. At a guess, the XML doc is being created by building a huge ass DOM and walking it off to the hard-drive. It’s only a guess, but how many entries and playlists did they make for the performance testing? My iPod can’t take all my music, so I’ve a large number of playlists. Could this be the issue? Could any of the engineers at Apple tell me? I’d be very interested to know. Act now before I get tied into another NDA 🙂
enough of the rantage, I need to get suited up.