Also, what do you mean vfdlib will be obsolete, exactly? Finally, new version of the player??

No, it's just that currently, vfdlib knows how to render the fonts that come with version 2 of the player, but not the fonts that come with version 3.

If you would distribute the old fonts with your player and use those, vfdlib will keep working.

On that note, would it be a big deal to not support the database format?

It would be a huge plus if the player could use the existing data as-is. It should not be to hard, as there already is open source software that reads and writes the needed data structure.

Or else I would have to get id3lib to compile to read the tag directly (squash can do this on the PC, but the exectutable may grow quite a bit if I include a C++ library statically as well).

You could use libid3tag which is written in plain C rather than C++. But there's no need to do this if you can read the existing tags and database.

Pim