Well for now the LED animation has only used examples that come with the neopixel.h library, and these examples are blocking in nature, causing the program to be non responsive while these are executed (which is pretty much all the time) Have a look at the blink without delay example and use millis() for timing all through your sketch. The way it is now you can have 1 animation happening at once, while it is possible to have animations on different strip simultaniously.
Also you can let the sketch be responsive to external commands all the time, rather than just at the end or beginning of the whole animation.
You are using swSerial to communicate with the player, and so far you put a delay() after you have sent something, but what you really need to do is flush() to make sure that whatever is in the buffer gets send completely before interrupts get turned off by the show() function.