The Melody of Memory discord has a speedrunning channel: https://discord.com/invite/2eqsVCzNbb

So if this could be done with only one play it could potentially save 30 seconds...does anyone know if this is possible?

If we're talking about the original one here, I have (I actually ran it once, though I never did anything with the run), and I really don't like it much. From what I can tell, the level progress is measured by the number of spheres cleared, so there's no real way to speed things up other than to just spam shoot as fast as you can to clear everything as fast as possible. Without gap shots or combos that matter there's no reason to do anything risky. All in all it just feels like a super long auto-scroller. And I mean super-long...the game just drags on and on and on because the levels get so long near the end.

Starting on Enter should be fine, since starting on Iron Frog would add less than a second to the run anyway. Plus there's IGT for the mode anyway, so...