Since the beginning, I have been living with the hindrance of having to restart Starbound completely when making small changes to, either the player file(Editing, adding, and removing a player), or the songs folder. Why not load these when it needs them? As in, load the player files when you click on Multiplayer or Singleplayer. Or, load the song names when it needs them, then the song when it is actually played. It has been a small nuisance, it is not a required fix, I won't quit if it isn't changed, but I do wish that this be taken into consideration. tl;dr Loading of trivial things like players, and songs during runtime would be great.
The problem with not loading these until needed is that it may increase the wait times when it calls for them, such as when you attempt to play an instrument or perform another action (manifesting as a noticeable freeze/pause on, say, attempting to play a song, until loading complete). Even though Starbound takes several minutes to start up, there is a performance benefit to loading everything up front. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways, if the game doesn't know that something has changed it won't know to reload the assets after the initial loading period. I believe that there was a short-lived admin command to reload stuff, but I think it was abandoned, at least until other things were finished. I would imagine that there will be a similar command down the road, since reloading assets/configs is very handy to server admins and mod developers.
I can't say for players, but I know if you replace an abc file with another abc file that has an identical name, the file will update itself ingame whether or not you restart the game. New ABC files added will not be seen in the game until you restart, though. So that much is definitely possible, although I'm not sure how you'll tell the game to check for music files without causing the game to lag too much. Maybe there can be a REFRESH button on the ABC file list in-game. Heck, maybe the same would work for players on the Character Select screen.
