joshafc - there are three things that affect the time of a track upload - the actual upload time, the pending time and the analysis time. The upload time is going to be affected by your local bandwidth. If you have a slow connection to the internet, the track upload will be slow. The pending time depends on how many other analyses are taking place simultaneously. The analysis time takes about 1 second per minute of audio. All this being said, it typically takes about 10 to 20 seconds for most track upload/analysis to complete.
As for the 20 accesses every minute, the jEN library will poll the track status after an upload which is probably why you are seeing more than 20 accesses per minute. I recommend that you upgrade your account to 120 calls per minute. You can do this by going to your account page, clicking on the 'upgrade' button and filling out the form.
Song identify will identify a song based on a precomputed fingerprint (using echoprint). track/upload will compute the fingerprint for you based on the audio. Since the fingerprint is typically much smaller than the audio, Song identify sends less data over the wire, and thus would likely run faster, however, you have to get the fingerprinter and run it all locally to use song/identify. Track/Upload will be easier to use.
Note that we currently don't return album info in our API, so you will not be able to retrieve the album name using either of these api methods.
Hope this helps
Paul