I'd agree that the current playlist 'queue' is in memory.

However,the current playlist is built in memory but is then persisted (saved to disk)whenever you power the player off if it didn't then the current playlist position and 'queue of songs to play next' would be incorrect when you restarted your car/player.

So, given that this info *is* written to the disk already, all thats needed is to find out the format and location where this info is stored and then make use of it.

Most likely in the same disk area where the playcounts and other stuff is stored.
[special partition on the disk from memory - (a search on this forum will turn up the info about it)

I also saw a comment from Hugo (The main guy behind the empeg/RioCar) about this a while back.

So, if we can get this info from the disk then will be a good start.

Albeit this information is only persisted whenever the player app quits, and therefore any new tracks added to the current playlist won't show up on disk until the player (application) is shutdown - there may be a way we can ask nicely for the player to refresh the on-disk copy of the playlist (e.g. via SIGUSR1 perhaps signal to the player app) - this may be able to be added by the folks who control the player apps source code when they get a breather from earning a living.

Once we have the persisted playlist on-disk format we can then create a hijack "feature" that exposes this via a /proc/empeg_playlist "special" file that when read returns a XML representation of the playlist built from the persistent copy of the playlist on disk.

By matching this list (of FIDS no doubt) with the current song info (also available in a /proc/... file) , you can then work out where in this playlist you are.