Is there any way to have a Wendy filter set by looking at the date? For instance when the empeg boots, it checks the date, which if its within a date field set by the user certain songs become available. Xmas music, Sandler's Thanksgiving Song, The World is Full of Stupid People on Election Day.... the list goes on.

Not automatically. You can define wendy flags for these things, and then define a wendy filter that selects them. But it's up to you to select them on a particular day.

Interesting idea for a wishlist item, though. Time/Date/Day-based wendys.

Imagine...

- Always have it filter out certain songs between 8-9am and 5-6pm on weekdays, because you have the carpool in the car with you.

- Rev's suggestion of holiday tracks.

- "wake-up" music in the mornings, "cool-down" music in the evenings.

- All really-quiet tracks after 10pm.

Etc...

- All really-quiet tracks after 10pm.


If I'm in the car after 10pm, I *want* to stay awake

Okay, add home/car sensing to the mix, and then you could have only the really-quiet tracks in home mode only.

Of course, there's always this to keep in mind.

One of these days I really need to devote some thought to how RVA2 tags might be used without help from the player software, because you've reminded me that it really sucks to get a soft track while driving on loud pavement... because then you can't hear it!

One of these days I really need to devote some thought to how RVA2 tags might be used

Have you got any software that can add them? Does it do it automatically, or do you have to tell it what your perceived volume is?

Peter

the normalize package (yes, let's not discuss how it's misnamed again) which is pointed to from freshmeat includes a utility to calculate and add them; Basically instead of needing to quantify yourself it can be made to work with e.g. your whole music collection.

It's too bad that we don't have a piece of real-time software running right on the empeg player itself which already handles this, including the ability to adjust for the quiet parts of an otherwise loud song.

In reply to:

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It's too bad that we don't have a piece of real-time software running right on the empeg player itself which already handles this, including the ability to adjust for the quiet parts of an otherwise loud song.

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In seriousness, normalisation for CDs mastered way below the usual norm is best done as a one-off operation before encoding. I've tried normalize->encode->decode and it is kinder to the music than encode->decode->normalize (because it brings more of the sound above the absolute threshold of hearing in the lossy encode step). Add to which VolAdj adjusts relative levels within a track which is not necessarily what you want.

I use VolAdj in the car, but not at home. I don't use it to compensate for recording level differences - more to compensate for listening in a noisy environment.

In short, two different tools for two different porpoises.

n seriousness, normalisation for CDs mastered way below the usual norm is best done as a one-off operation before encoding.

I find myself in vehement agreement.

There's just the little problem of what to do about the 5gb of bootlegs I didn't encode myself.