it takes a second for the heads to move to the sector of the HD that the music you want to listen to is in, when you are on a playlist it can cache the thing in the 32MB (around that much may be 16MB may be 64MB, i'm not sure) memory so it transitions smoothly, but it cant know that your going to jump around on the HD so it has to have that access time delay, it happens on all HD based players.