By the time flash memory-based portable MP3 players became commonplace their design was copying software players, not the other way around. Maybe other people were listening to music differently than me… but for me, back when screen real estate was at such a premium, a music player’s job was to be small, unintrusive, and out-of-the-way. It’s a mystery to me why anybody would (or still does) make media player software or skins for them that eat so much screen space, frequently looking ugly while they do so, only to look like a hypothetical hardware device that wouldn’t actually become commonplace until years after this kind of player design premiered!