Better than getting the filtering done real-time would be to not have filtering at all, but rather to add explicit sort keys for the artist, album, and song title fields (this is, as some of you may know, a feature I desperately want to see - as in this post :). They're in the ID3v2.4 standard, and they'd be a great addition to the Empeg's metadata. This way, for each of the fields you'd be able to have a sort key that is used to order it in the soup views. This lets you do things like setting the key for "The Beatles" to "Beatles, The", which the Empeg software partially deals with now, but also lets you do things like setting the key for "Peter Gabriel" to "Gabriel, Peter", which the software currently doesn't even attempt to deal with (for good reason).

Of course, I'd be shocked to see this happen in time for 2.0 (also for good reason) - but one never knows, I guess, given that a major new feature (the Info: Seek mode) somehow snuck into beta 7. It'd be a great thing to see in some later version though, and would be useful for the HSX109 and the Rio Receiver as well.