Possible solutions to playing CDs with the EMPEG.

1) The EMPEG can control two IDE devices. If one of those happened to be a CD-ROM drive, you'd be in business. You'd have this awful IDE cable snaking out of the EMPEG box, plus you'd have to write device drivers and so forth.

2) A standalone computer or laptop can read the CD and feed the bits over Ethernet to the EMPEG, either in batch mode (i.e., rip the CD, upload it, then play it) or interactively (Ethernet is 10 Mbits, CD audio is 1.5 Mbits -- in theory you can turn the EMPEG into a streaming player). Add wireless Ethernet for that extra panache.

Option #2 would work particularly well in competition, particularly if you could convince the EMPEG folks to develop some custom software on the player side to receive and buffer the streaming audio data (or port the software from the Rio Receiver). In either case, you'd have to be careful you were using a decent CD-ROM drive that gave accurate "rips" (Plextor is a good one, most laptop drives aren't). The last thing you want is to loose a competition because your CD-ROM drive hiccuped and the music popped.