As for manually scoring. I don't mind implementing this, but just like custormizing the playlist, this is alot of work for the user.

My ideal interface would be hitting two buttons on my remote, the first saying "rate this song" and the second being a number from 0-9. With my steering wheel remote, I could easily rate songs as they're played, which is much less effort than manually creating playlists. More effort than your skips/plays setup, but not much.

The important part is that it's shuffle of all the music, not some magic dijinn that knows exactly what you want to listen to right now.

Yeah I understand that. I just think numerical ratings offer more flexibility and precision for getting a better shuffle with more "good" songs. With numerical ratings, after one pass through your entire collection, you'll have songs rated 8 or 9 showing up many more times than songs rated 2 or 3. With plays/skips, it seems you need to go through several times to build up a skipped vs. play count that would be meaningful in separating good vs. bad. I think you may have alluded to this with your point about the "input rate." I think it all boils down to a tradeoff between effort and accuracy, but both methods are better than a plain old random shuffle... Using both would be the best of both worlds.

In any event, I think your efforts to develop an open-source player for the empeg are commendable, and I'll be following your progress closely. Maybe if this thing takes off I will give manual ratings a shot myself.