Actually, in beta7 a lot of work has been done on the menus (well, Mike's been slaving over them :) ) - this means that hierarchical menus are now properly supported (eg: the playlist menus) and can be used for other options.

The idea is to move the sound controls to a sound menu, yes. I'd expect the next release will probably have some tidying of the menu structure before it gets too ungainly. We're also working on (user definable) audio prompts for the menus, but this might not make it into the betas for a little while.

We did have vertical menus way before beta1, but they were a lot less satisfactory than the horizontal ones (anyone who saw the empeg at the mp3 summit would have seen the vertical ones).

Please don't be afraid of suggesting things - we do want user feedback. Mark's fear of be hitting him when he suggests internal playlist skipping is just because it's something I've got to get around to but I've been too busy with pointy-hair-dilbert-boss-activities to do a lot of programming :)

Hugo