Found another fixed point decoder by a guy called Nicolas Pitre

Yes, he's the guy that did lots of the StrongARM work on the Linux kernel. The -np in the name of car-player kernels is Nicolas Pitre, as we used his patches.

Downloaded, compiled pretty much straight out of the box

Yes, I did too. It sounds pretty good. 30% CPU is a bit more than MP3 decoding takes, but not prohibitively more.

NP's code is GPL, so we couldn't release it in the car player (we'd use the Xiph one that Emmett offered us), but something tells me it'll be useful for integration testing before the paperwork for the Xiph one gets sorted out. (Presumably the API is pretty much the same for the -np library, the trad Xiph library, and the Tremor library.)

Peter