You are right, a web page which start and ends songs on an open system works probably quite well; the only problem with the empeg is that I cannot tell it to play a certain song. As you said, you start up mpg123 with the name of the file, which isn't possible on the empeg. Displayserver lets you control the front-buttons of your empeg, which generate pseudo IR-codes. eg to fast-forward a file, you should hold down the right button, which will generate a sequence of IR-codes with a certain delay-time. Unfortunately these delay-times are shorter than the time it takes to click twice in your web-browser.
You could implement the kind of interface you are talking about on the empeg though, only not in an hour of so. Don't forget, you don't have access to convenient commands like killall or aumix, everything has to be coded in a low level language to make the running process as small and efficient as can be...
If I had to recode displayserver in perl, the size of the code was probably reduced by about 80%

If I had the time and the sourcecode for displayserver, I'm sure I could do something like that without much pain.
You can download the source; Unfortunately I cannot miss the time
This reminds me of Luke Skywalker : may the source be with you...

Frank van Gestel