Folks, you're all banging your heads against the proverbial brick wall. Nokia have already decided that this is the way that they want the N900 media player application to work.

If you take a look at bug 6911 on bugzilla, it's been flagged as RESOLVED/WONTFIX. It has also been marked as a duplicate of bug 7263, which is also marked as RESOLVED/WONTFIX.

I'm sure Andre won't mind me re-posting one of his comments on these bug reports:

Nokia are not going to fix this...as Andre says, feel free to draw your own conclusions.