I thought we had enough access to the DSP to turn the volume up and down if needed ?

Maybe, I'm not sure. I don't remember any ioctl()'s which give it to us, maybe from inside the kernel one can do it. I forget how rjlov does it actually. Obviously silently changing it at the DSP would be preferable to sending a bunch of volume IR commands.

The FM/AM problem is tricky.

Maybe not *that* tricky. If there's a state block bit assigned to it, it'd be real easy. I'll look for it tonight.