Catalex MP3 player

[JSDL]

Hi everyone, I am building a line follower using a pair of IR TX/RX modules from Ebay. The line following works fine, however, I have a question regarding the Catalex MP3 player. I can get the module working no problem by sending the appropriate HEX bytes, however, I want the robot to "speak" the direction it is turning as it maneuvers around the track. The problem I am having is that when the robot is bouncing left to right to stay on track, the MP3 player doesn't have enough time to carry out the play command to play the track before it is issued another command to play the track again. The result is that I don't hear anything unless the transmission from black to white is sharp, and there is enough time for it to play the track (hope this makes sense). In other words, if I wave my hand beneath the sensor it plays fine, but if I hold it under the sensor, the track doesn't play until I remove my hand. I am wondering if there is any clever technique for allowing the track to play before sending it another track. I tried experimenting with short delays before each read of the sensors, but even 500 ms which was the lowest delay to let the track play out (all it plays is "right" or "left" for now) was too long to cause the robot to lose its positioning. I was thinking to somehow incorporate a state machine in some way, maybe possibly setting the MP3 chip into SLEEP mode for a period of time before it receives a new command. The trade-off of this would be that if the robot bounces along the track, it might miss a couple play commands during this period, but it would probably go unnoticed. Any thoughts? Hope this all made sense.