These intermittent hangups are annoying and unexpected, especially when the game is single-player.
It would be nice if all that loading could be done at the beginning of the game, and not right before the asset is sent to the player.
I can probably work around them for now, by sending all assets to the player before the game begins (at 0 volume and assets hidden below a black loading screen, for example), but a simple world variable would be nice.
world
precache_resources = TRUE
For sound files those have actually already been downloaded though, and what you're hearing is the delay in the sound engine for loading them up. This has improved from past versions a bit but it could probably stand to improve further.