I actually don't believe it's as big a job as it first looks.

If I were to do it (I don't currently plan to, btw.),

I'd get the .mp3 decoder from xaudio (same as original player did, I think), which is cheap, with sourcecode, and works okay.

I'd skip WMA completely, but if anyone wanted to add it, they could. The RioCar only just got WMA on Friday anyway, so that's not a big deal.

The menus, and nearly all of the "features" on them, appear rather trivial to implement. With tons more memory to play with (compared to Hijack), they could be downright easy. It's just that the sum of them all tends to be large. But nothing really daunting there.

The Prolux Visuals.. ugh.. MASSIVE programming job for those.

Some of the larger pieces of software are Emplode, Emptool (and JEmplode), all of which could just be left as-is, so long as the new player used the same database files/format. There are advantages to this, in that the new/old players could be swapped at runtime (by Hijack!).

Going forward, JEmplode could be enriched with new features, Emplode would rot, and emptool would need to be rewritten (too buggy as is).

-ml