iTunes 7 hack to remove album art & gapless playback?

[large filipino]

Hey guys. This is my first post. I browsed around for something that may answer my question but to no avail,but if I missed it,I do apologize.

Anyway,I have the second generation iPod 2 gig. It requires iTunes 7 for it to work right. I didn't know this before,but my iTunes 7 was going way slow and just freezing all the time,(I have over 100 gb of music on it via external hard drive) so I deleted it all with Clean App (awesome program,btw) and reinstalled iTunes 6. Then everything worked really well,never froze,never slowed down,till I made my discovery that I need iTunes 7 to get my iPod transferring music again.

So back with my iTunes 7 which really sucks and never changed.
So my question is,is there any way we can go in like terminal and modify iTunes 7? I want to completely do away with album art and gapless playback. I think these are the things that slow everything way down.

Basically I want to hack enough out so I'm left with basically an iTunes 6 with second generation iPod capability.

I've been browsing this forum and y'all seem like a smart bunch here.
This is my first post so I'll check back tomorrow.
Thanks for having me here!!

[EatsWithFingers]

I want to completely do away with album art and gapless playback.
The album artwork bit is easy to solve. Go to preferences and uncheck "Automatically Download Missing Album Artwork" (in the General pane). Then just don't add any manually. To clear all existing artwork, select all songs, Get Info on them and check the artwork box (with nothing actually in the box), then click on OK. That last step may take a while....

Oh, you then may have to clear downloaded artwork. This can be done by ctrl-clicking on the artwork and selecting "Clear Downloaded Artwork". May be a bit tedious if you have a lot you want to clear. Alternatively, trashing the Downloaded Artwork folder may also work (I haven't tried though).

If, however, you want the manually added artwork to remain embedded in the song files, then using the standard list view for songs should mean that iTunes never does anything with the artwork, and thus isn't slowing down.

I'm afraid I can't help on the gapless playback front, although I'm sure that is a one-off operation and is not something that taxes the CPU any more than playback of non-gapless tracks.

My suggestion would be that it the disk access that is slowing things down. Likely causes are if you are using the disk for other things simulatneously, or if the music files are large. Mac/HDD specs would help with identifying other possible causes.