I've seen a lot of site where people donate money in hopes of finding somebody that can complete a requested hack. I'll start the bidding at $200.

The Empeg Riocar, http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php, is an mp3 player for your car. I've had one for years and I would like to replace it with an iPod. However, the Riocar has one feature that the iPod can't touch and has become a vital part of my music experience in the car.

The remote that comes with the car, http://riocar.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Button_Guide&file=index, features numbers 0-9 and letters. The Riocar allows you to search by Artist, Song, Album or any other ID3 tag of a song.

If I want to listen to a particular song or artist, I can literally find it in a couple seconds. To take this amazing feature even further, the results of your search can replace your current playlist or be added to your current playlist in different ways: next, last, etc.

I'm sure there is somebody out there capable of performing this hack and thousands of people who would love to use it. A remote with these functions can surely make the iPod loved by even more.

I forget the name of the company, but somebody just released an iPod dock that has a remote and outputs the iPod menu onto a TV. I would use my requested hack for my car and home.

Somebody let me know if this is possible at erik@xiwebdesigns.com

I'll start the bidding at $200.

Not to rain on your parade or anything... but what makes the Riocar superior to anything else currently available is not the Riocar player, but the software that runs it.

There is about ten man-years of development time in the software that runs the Riocar, development done by a group of people who are acknowledged and sought after as the best in the world in this particular software niche.

$200 will buy you about one hour of one of that group's time. That leaves just 87,599 hours to go. Oh, wait -- I forgot leap years. Make that 87,647 hours.

I don't think it's gonna happen. Sorry...

tanstaafl.

Don't let these guys bust your chops too hard. We're admittedly a group of zealots around here.

I'm not even sure the firmware on the Ipod is updatable by users. If this was done, it'd most likely need to be a hardware add-on that sends commands to the ipod. Expensive, time consuming, and highly technical.

Hasn't anyone hacked Linux onto an iPod yet? What's stoping that same breed of limit-pushing tinkerer from patching the iPod source. Slashdot is waiting.....

Who's waiting?
Google has the answers.

Nah. I think he was saying that 'given that someone has hacked the ipod to run linux', there should be someone capable of hacking this feature into the ipod software. It's the latter that people are waiting for.