I am an recent buyer of a RioCar Mark2 (20GB) [snip]

After upgrading the player software to 2.00b11 (dev), I had a wonderful "soup" dropdown under the "Playlist" menu that allowed me to choose the songs by artist, gnere, year, etc in addition to just getting my pre-made playlists.

Did the person you bought it from perchance have a long scarf, a robotic dog, and a blue telephone box that made wheezing noises?

Soup menus on the player are a feature we certainly intend to implement in the future, but we haven't done so yet. I can only suggest that the previous owner had explicitly set up a collection of soup playlists. The only "soupy" feature in any car player software, even internal builds, is the search window -- which lets you select songs by artist, genre, year, etc indepedent of what playlists they might be in.

Unless there was a version of Hijack that did something clever with soup menus?

Peter