I haven't had a chance to try the centro player yet, but I do have a crazy pipe dream feature request.

So, we all love our empegs, but a lot of us are also cheating on our empegs with podcasts and cloud-y music services. The possibility of tight integration of these things into the stock player was virtually nil, but with a fully open-source player, it seems like these ideas might be within reach.

One such idea I'm thinking about would be the ability to play tracks from Google Music, and it turns out someone has already done a lot of the hard work involved in exposing Google Music libraries as a Linux filesystem using FUSE. You install the app, run it, and it goes out and indexes your collection, and gives you a relatively sane directory structure under which you can get easy access to the MP3 files.

So, the missing piece is how to easily integrate MP3 files on the Android smartphone's filesystem with the Centro ecosystem, and for that, I was thinking something like MPD might fit in well. There's an android port, which means in theory one could run a server on the phone to serve up the mp3 files as content that can be streamed over to an mpd client, e.g. a Centro player speaking the mpd protocol.

Obviously the architecture is getting a bit Rube Goldbergian at this point, but with these pieces of the puzzle available, the task of having Google Music content playing on empeg hardware actually seems doable.

Anyway, I'm still finishing up my own empeg install and associated software bits, but once I have an empeg in my car, I'm going to give Centro a try, and if it's something I could see using as my everyday player, I might (might!) try to experiment with making this happen. Just thought I'd throw the idea out there and see what y'all think.