I'm having a ton of fun with the empeg and listening to music that I've ignored for years. But I'm finding it way more cumbersome to use in the car than I'd like. I have to do too much dangerous menu navigation while in the car.

I have my playlists organized in an Artist/Album hierarchy. I usually listen by navigating to a particular album or by shuffling an entire genre. But since I'm in a music rediscovery mode I find that hearing a particular song often triggers me wanting to listen to a different album by the same artist. So then I have to navigate through a long menu list or search on an album title (if I can remember it). I'm not proud to say that my impatience gets the better of me and I've been focusing on this dangerous diversion while driving.

Now the hard part - what sort of UI would make my life easier? For the case where I've navigated to the particular album via the playlist, there is a solution that would be perfect for me. I would like the top button (the one that currently pauses) to return me to my previous location in the menu.

I realize that Empeg couldn't just make this the standard behavior of the top button because it probably wouldn't be desired by many (majority?) people. I think what would make the empeg so much more pleasant to use in the car would be a way to allow the user to assign the shortcuts of their choice to the front panel and remote buttons. Obviously, I would choose this particular shortcut for the top button. But I would also like shortcuts for the different ways of searching, instead of cycling through them.

If Empeg could implement the above idea that would be killer. But that still doesn't solve my problem of how to quickly get to a particular artist's playlist when I started by shuffling some larger playlist or genre. I can't think of a decent solution for this one in the context of the empeg's current organizational paradigm. I guess, in general, I'd the empeg to provide more default organization based on artists and albums. This is something that I really liked about the Creative Nomad Jukebox. It's top level navigational hierarchy had Playlists, Artists, and Albums (and I think Genre, too). Playlists were explicitly created by the user but the others were generated from ID3 tags. If the empeg had some automatic hierarchy based on Artist/Album then a shortcut could be created that would allow me to hop over to the playlist for the current playing artist with one button press.

Before someone asks, the empeg's searching categories don't duplicate the Creative Jukebox's auto generated playlist hierarchy because the empeg flattens it out beneath the first category and doesn't allow continued navigation into subcategories (i.e.. Artist into Album).

While we're talking about the Jukebox, I liked it's model of queuing up a temporary playlist when picking something to play. It solves the problem of being on the highway and having the current playlist run out. You could dynamically queue up a few things before the trip begins without needing to construct a playlist in Emplode. I'm not very interested in constructing static playlists on my computer. I never know what whim will strike me when I'm in the car. I want a dynamic way to queue up artists, albums and tracks.

So those are my ideas and primary complaints about the empeg's in car usability. I probably haven't suggested anything new. I think the empeg is a great product with a ton of potential but I don't think the current UI realizes it's full potential. While they've put in some great features it's still awkward enough that I couldn't recommend it to someone else without reservation.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could make the current empeg UI work better for me? I'm all ears. Thanks.

-Dylan