So.. now that you've rolled your own RS232 level converters, perhaps think about using that to interface the BT board directly to the empeg, rather than having an extra processor (Arduino) in the middle?

I expect to catch up to you within a few weeks perhaps, using such a setup, blatantly stealing ..re-using.. your code/ideas to run directly on the empeg.

Pretty awesome demo, by the way!!

EDIT:
I'm not sure that the empeg really has the concept of an "Album" (or does it?). It knows about "playlists" though, and those have names which could be made available.

If the pause/play status is being lost somehow, you can still detect it in your middleman by noting that the timecodes either stop or stop increasing.