I'm interested to know if folks have any bright ideas for inclusion and formatting of performer, conductor, etc.

ID3v2 does have tags for all that sort of stuff, but currently Emplode/emptool/the player do nothing with them. If you wanted to take advantage of them, you'd have to auto-build playlists from them yourself -- e.g. by writing a script (on a Unix system) to make directories full of symlinks, and then using emptool's "upload -p -r".

Peter