Great news...
I was thinking of rewriting init, as this seems to be the ideal application for starting up external apps.
The idea is that init does the usual stuff ( mount disks, start player ) and then reads a file which contains menu items and commands to execute.
This will keep memory usage low and shouldn't affect the player app.
Is the source for the original init available? If it's not, would it suffice to mount disks and start the player app?