Yup, that old 80/20 rule.

This is what I meant by the "grossly underestimate" comment in my other post. If all you go by is the user interface, every piece of software looks easy to write. The tough things are the things you can't see, like the caching control, the fast database indexing, the playlist management, etc.

This is not to say that I don't think it could be done. And if anyone could do it, Mark could. There's also no reason that a replacement player would have to be as good as the original player software in each and every aspect.

Mark, the only comment I have about your list: If you choose to embark on the project, please don't use Xaudio. The empeg guys dropped it for good reason.

This points up another problem of writing your own player software: Re-inventing lots of wheels. The empeg guys learned a lot of lessons in writing the player software, and anyone who tries to follow in those footsteps wouldn't have the benefit of all those learned lessons.