I've compiled pianobar for my own use as well. However, I was disappointed in the performance (seems to eat the battery).

I think that it would be good if we could hook it up to gstreamer to get hardware acceleration if possible. It would be nice if someone would figure out how do do this with libpiano so that frontends could be built against that and then we would just need to maintain libpiano. And maybe someone should try to port the "Pithos" frondend. Not sure how possible/difficult all this would be.