Or why not run this process in the background while the player's playing? I suppose it means mounting some partition read-write, but it could just be the scratch partition - the results of the scan could be uploaded to the music partition and so forth when the player is doing a sync.

I suppose there's good and bad things about that decision...

And is there any news about the possibility of running the Distributed.Net client while the empeg is playing?

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.