Yeah, I know. Far from elegant though. I actually miss the stop button, and I often find myself wanting to use it.
Ok, now I'm curious as to what you want to use the stop button for. The only time I've wanted to use something like that is when using the mp3 player to provide tracks for a panto I was involved with, and there were other complications involved (like stopping at the end of the track). So in the end I played the tracks off the laptop (had a handful of mplayer2 windows, one per file, and triggered the tracks from them).