Suddenly very slow performance

I have not noticed any slow down on any of the sites where I use audio album and your site loads pretty much instantly for me (Firefox 29.0.1 OSX 10.9.2), so I am unable to see the issue.

Are you able to investigate whether the issue is consistent for you at different times of day, with different browsers, on different PCs/devices and on different network connections?

very strange – I have tested my site on 5 different computers here (PC and Mac, on safari, on chrome, on msie, on firefox). I noticed on all systems this slowdown. My Internet connection is good. I have no idea where this problem is coming from .

This may be caused by a function I added in the latest version of the plugin which delays showing the audio players until the page is loaded. This is intended to prevent the players showing with the WP default styles and then changing after all the files to make up the page are loaded. If this is the cause, the audio players are not actually taking any longer to load; the wait before the players display will depend on the overall weight of all the files making up the page as well as the connection speeds.

If you prefer the previous behaviour of the plugin, you can try removing this delayed loading by removing the function. You can do this by adding the following line to the functions.php of your child theme or a custom functions plugin:

remove_action('wp_head', 'cc_hide_audio_until_load');

I think it’s exactely the issue You describe. The audio players wait until other things are loaded. Before the players were loaded in a mismatched default style which suddenly changed into the correct style.
Thanks for Your assistance.

Is there any way we can get this to load faster, without implementing the above suggested fix? It is especially slow on mobile devices. I love the plugin but don’t like how slow it is.

The Audio Album plugin makes use of the native audio embeds in WordPress and just loads a few extra things for styling. It doesn’t attempt to improve the speed over using using the default audio embed shortcodes, so the answer is probably no.