[V99]

The product that came from this project (Empeg/Rio Car) was/is actually quite nice and well thought out for navigating while driving and minimal looking at the screen. Physical buttons and a rotary encoder with detents so you know exactly how far you moved when scrolling slowly.

You quickly learned the button sequence for the operations you used a lot to be able to do them without looking at all. For picking actual music everything was a set of nested playlists/folders. The structure of them was up to you to define in the desktop app, which could make things that are the result of a search of ID3 data or pull off the first letter of the artist or whatever you want depending on how much music you have and how you like to play it.

You load something into the active play queue and then can modify that by prepend/appending more without losing the rest. "Wendy" filters to dynamically disable content that a certain passenger doesn't like when you say they're in the car (Wendy was the girlfriend of one of the developers, I think). A LOT more flexible than most players today. So... also probably way too complicated for normal people today, but super powerful and customizable.

There were only a few thousand built, and a lot of them are still in use today. Few modern cars have a DIN slot anymore, but the community has built some elaborate ways to keep using these by separating out the display/controls and mount just them in the cabin, integrating with car bluetooth controls invented long after Rio went bankrupt, etc.