Nice! I have a real soft spot in my heart for Rockbox, glad to see it still having some life.

The interface and performance are just so well thought out and refined.

Plus it contains the earliest published code I ever wrote: https://github.com/tsirysndr/rockbox-zig/tree/master/apps/pl... , so that's fun for me.

What's the advantage of using cpal over something like libmpv?

Out of curiosity, since I've never understood it, what is the point of music player daemons? What makes them different from any old media player?

This is brilliant. The forcing function of limited hardware is one of the things that made Rockbox great, and now it gets new life on the desktop.