My favourite music player on Linux, Amarok, seemed to have given up. The performance of Amarok 1.4.6 on my Ubuntu Feisty installation degraded severely during the last few months to the point that it was impossible to use. It took 3 minutes to load, up to a minute to start playback. It was horrible! I tried disabling as many features as I could think of - including the unique selling point of a seamless last.fm integration - to no avail.
As a final resort, and I still think it's peculiar to install a database management system for a music player, I installed postgres as database backend for Amarok - and lo and behold: all performance problems are gone...
Yesterday jw and I worked on bringing down the musiqchange.n--tree.net site. The plone site, originally intended to enable music sharing, seemed to attract an increasing amount of spambots, exhibited memory leaks, and was only used to host my own music. After considering millions of alternatives, including roll-your-own mp3 publishing system, we had a Great KISS Idea: just use plain HTML and css, in a static site...! We put all mp3s in an apache visible directory, and added an index.html page, using the existing n--tree styling. The result is here: http://walco.n--tree.net/music. This seems a small, even extremely trivial step for mankind, but it is a really huge one for a techie ;-)
The (lib)usb implementation on linux turned out to be very, very forgiving... Mixing in- and out endpoint addresses, not setting a device configuration - it just worked. On MacOSX and Win32 libusb was more strict, but after fixing the forementioned blatant errors, there is now a working Aksy on three platforms!