I'm thinking that was left out to help reduce the image. Is there any way to work a Hijack-style workaround? I'm just feeling that there could be other reasons down the road to use loopback.

Oh it's there, no need to hijack anything. It just needs to be brought up with ifconfig. And it isn't needed at all for the normal operation of the player because the player never has to talk to some other process on the same machine.

On the clock front, I looked in the Readme (finally!) and elsewhere and didn't see any reference to setting the Empeg's clock.

I don't think you'd really want a purely GPS based clock anyways. Just look at all the delays, gpsapp is (or should be) running at a lower priority compared to the player. I'd rather have my location lag by a second or two than skipping music. Gpsapp wakes up 10 times per second and handles whatever was in the serial buffers at that time. So any measurement we get is on average 50ms delayed. And then the timestamp we receive isn't even the UTC time that the message was sent/received, but rather the UTC time of the last time we calculated a fix, it might just as well be several seconds old. If we want to get a better time estimate we'd have to busy loop and grab stuff from the serial as soon as it is received.

It sounds more like you really want to use the local clock, but have it 'disciplined' by the PPS signal from the GPS receiver. I'm not sure the empeg really has the oomph left over to do that kind of stuff, it probably does if you don't care much about playing music. (and adding an intermediate gpsd will add even more unpredictable latency in the tcp socket buffers).

As a side note, v0.6 is out. The main change is that the the route description files are now an ascii format.