Very slowly reading directory and M3U8

[ohrenkino]

@iVents

but from my connected USB hard drive

Please compare:
SATA SSD up to 500 MByte per second, (~ 4000 Mbit per second)
USB3.0 5 to 30 Mbit per second.

So what happens if you copy the files from the USB drive first to the SSD and then load them?

The linked threads also suggested a number of further tuning steps like an exception in the Windows defender.
So please check those hints as well.
And there are some performance dates:

Sluggish performance

Couldn't you supply some real benchmarks? Like: how long does it (really) take to read the file? I just tried to read some 200.000 files from an external USB3.0 HDD and it took 10 minutes, 55 seconds if MP3tag resides on the same external drive 8 minutes, 59 seonds if MP3tag resides on the internal SSD. It becomes 6 minutes 43 seconds if MP3tag resides on an internal SSD and the data also on an internal HDD. It looks to me like you can expect to read some 20.000 files/minute.

How does your setup compare with these?