The unit itself looks smart, sounds good (how good it is in a car I'll tell you next week) and has had all sorts of people oohing and ahhhing over it (Until I tell them the price, then they look at me like I'm mad).

I've got three complaints with the Empeg:

1 - About half of the visuals are naff. About a quarter of the remainder are clever, but I'll never use them. It really should be possible to block out the ones you don't like. It's a shame that even the potentially good (but rather unappealingly named) 'Toilet floor' is ruined by the occasional (once a second ish) black line/flicker across the screen. My preferred graphic - 'Infotex dist' has a bug which has been covered before.

2 - The Empeg forces its own structure on you. While under some circumstances this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make it very difficult to find songs. As I've said, I'm not blessed with a wonderful memory and actually finding the album/song I want to listen to is not easy. This is for two reasons, both of which I've already mentioned in previous posts. a) The lack of a subsearch facility (i.e. the ability to search within the result set of a previous search), and b) the lack of the ability to search on playlist. By way of example, I have five Pink Floyd albums. I can never remember what two of them are called (just checked and they're 'Relics' and 'The division bell'). At the moment, if I want to play them, I have to search on artist 'Pink Floyd' and play the whole of the result (all 87 or so tracks). I then put the display into Info:Track and then skip forward until I see the album name I want, then start a new search by source for that album. It should not be that hard.

3 - The Genre/database bug. Now, I sent an e-mail to the guys at Empeg and posted the bug here. I've not had a reply from Empeg (not even a confirmation of receipt). Basically, search by genre doesn't work because my Empeg thinks I've got tracks with all sorts of Genres in them, when I haven't.

All in all though, when the above points have been cleared it'll be a product worth having. To be honest, after demoing it to people, I've had a hard time justifying to them why I've spent so much money. The Genre bug and lack of sub-search both made people say words to the effect of "Why did you spend so much money on a badly made piece of junk like that".

Based purely on the Empeg itself, I'd argue to its detractors that it was money well spent. However...

Emplode.

I'm not impressed.

Not at all.

It's non-intuitative, clumsy and lacks several of the functions which I would have thought would have been vital - for starters, it should be able to emulate the Empeg's creation of virtual playlists. At the moment I can see no way to get Emplode to show the Artist/title/genre virtual playlists, except saving the CSV and then loading that into a database for analysis.

Add to that the fact that even the simplest change (e.g. changing the name of a playlist) results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database' wait upon synchronisation. Sometimes you can add another couple of minutes while the unit downloads the database too. All this over ethernet.

Add to that the fact that deletion of some playlists actually deletes the tracks within the playlists and the deletion of others doesn't - it just moves them into 'Unattached items' (NB the songs only appeared in _one_ playlist). There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. Of course, the need for two syncs (one after the deletion of the original playlist, and another after the deletion of the tracks which have been moved into Unattached items) wouldn't be so bad if the syncs didn't take so long.

Add to that the fact that some updates in emplode don't register as needing to update the Empeg (sometimes I've found this with changing the playlist order and/or adding new tracks. Again, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to this).

Add to that numerous small niggles about what it says and what it doesn't say under various conditions and lots of other things.

All in all, I'm happy with the player itself and I'm totally gobsmacked (in a good way) by the level of support from the Empeg guys on this BB. However, I'm not at all happy with the user interfaces built on top of the hardware. As things stand, I couldn't recommend the Empeg to anybody other than a born-again gadget freak, and even then it would be with several caveats.

I pondered long and hard over how to phrase this post, or even post it at all - I figure there are zealots here who'll rip me to shreds. However, not everybody who buys an Empeg will be a zealot, and I rather suspect I'm not going to be the only person saying this sort of thing.

Nick.


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Hey ho, guess I'd better respond..

About half of the visuals are naff. About a quarter of the remainder are clever, but I'll never use them. It really should be possible to block out the ones you don't like

We've already stated that visuals will become plug-ins in a future release, so you'll be able to remove ones you don't like, and add in new ones from other authors as they become available. I believe the API for this is one of Toby's first jobs, although it's not a trivial task and will take a while. I have to say, you're the first person I've heard slag off the visuals - I was about to say second, but I think the other person was actually you in another thread. I don't see how anyone who has sat and watched Funnel Web for half an hour could find anything negative to say, but I guess it's horses for courses.

The Empeg forces its own structure on you

*cough* *splutter* You are kidding, right? Have you USED any other MP3 players?? You can organise your playlists however you want, you can create playlists on the fly, and Release 1.1 (2 - 3 weeks away) utterly revolutionises even this functionality.

I agree that search for playlist would be handy, and should be fairly trivial. I thought it already did this in a way if you set the tags for the playlist, but maybe I imagined it.

Searching on search results would be tricky to get into the UI - I guess it would be done as a search on current playlist. Although you have shot down the UI you haven't made any suggestions for how it could be improved. I think most long standing contributors here will realise that specific well argued suggestions get one of three responses from us - "Yes, we'll do it", "We'd like to do it, but there are reasons why we can't" or "Sorry, you're mad". There have been a lot of suggestions that got response (a).

The Genre/database bug. Now, I sent an e-mail to the guys at Empeg and posted the bug here. I've not had a reply from Empeg

It's a bug. As a new owner I guess you don't realise yet that we put out software releases on a very regular basis, and stuff like this gets fixed quickly. As for not getting a reply, the bugs mailbox is not currently operated by Customer Services (my baby). Instead, the emails are sent to a number of the developers (Hugo's babies) who deal with them when they get a minute. Sometimes they look at them, fix the bug (or allocate it to someone else) and don't bother replying to the original email - programmers will be programmers I guess. Despite the downside, I think the advantage of keeping bugs in the domain of the developers are considerable and issues get dealt with more quickly than if they entered the support database. If there's a show stopping bug and you're about to throw your empeg out of the window, there's always [email protected] which should get you a reply inside 24 hours (probably faster).

Don't bother sending this bug to support, though. We know about it.

To be honest, after demoing it to people, I've had a hard time justifying to them why I've spent so much money.

Don't ever go for a job in press relations - when I demo the player (which I do a lot!) I usually have people offering their first born to skip the queue. Are you really that unimpressed? This is by far the worst review that we've ever had, and it makes me worried that the documentation has failed to get across the full point of the product. If you do "get it" and you think it sucks, I can live with that

The Genre bug and lack of sub-search both made people say words to the effect of "Why did you spend so much money on a badly made piece of junk like that"

Whatever you do, never ever show them a PJB, or an Aiwa MP3 head, or practically any other MP3 player on the market. They'll probably burst a blood vessel. Oh, keep them away from CD Autochangers as well - those have the worst UI you can imagine, and are far more expensive per hour of music than a 6Gb empeg.

It's non-intuitative

You have a point in so much as it works just like Windows Explorer. It's interesting that a number of major MP3 manufacturers have commented that our way of doing things walks all over their brushed-chrome-effect applications, though.

for starters, it should be able to emulate the Empeg's creation of virtual playlists

Why?? Emplode is there to manage playlists. The player is there to access data within those playlists. I believe Roger is working on something to search for tracks from emplode by tag, but other than that I don't understand what you're getting at.

results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database'

It's a bug - it didn't do that a month ago, and all being well it won't do it on the next release. I think you're very much in the mindset of buying traditional audio products or major software applications, whereby what you get out of the box is what you think you're going to be stuck with. We don't work like that - there have been 12 public Beta releases since last summer, each of them fixing problems and introducing a huge number of new features. R1.1 is due out soon, as I said, and includes enough new stuff that most manufacturers would call it 2.0 and slap on a price tag. We're supplying it free, even though it's costing us rather a lot of money in licencing fees.

You then go on to mention a number of other bugs (some of which I've never even heard of, have you reported them?) to which my above response applies.

Bear in mind that the latest release of emplode was a major rewrite (even though it looks similar to earlier versions), and a number of new problems were bound to slip in. Hopefully they'll slip out again just as quickly.

Rob

I figure there are zealots here who'll rip me to shreds.

I'm a zealot, but I'll do my best not to rip you to shreds. You have some valid complaints.

But to be fair, some of those complaints are obvious bugs which will be fixed very soon. That's the beauty of the Empeg- its software is upgradeable very easily. And the Empeg folks have been traditionally good about fixing bugs when they are reported. Some of the bugs you're reporting are new ones that have never been seen before, so give it a little time and you'll be pleased to see them fixed in pretty short order.

Some of your complaints are feature requests. Empeg is very good about adding requested features when they make sense and fit with their long-term goals of how the unit should evolve.

One of your complaints is a difference between the Empeg's intended design and the way you're using it. In this case, I can suggest an alternate way of doing it which will get the intended result.

Okay, let's start with the obvious bugs:

The Genre/database bug. Now, I sent an e-mail to the guys at Empeg and posted the bug here. I've not had a reply from Empeg (not even a confirmation of receipt).

It's surprising that they haven't gotten back to you on this one, but rest assured that if the mail got to them, they will address it. Even if the mail didn't reach them, you posted it here on Bug Reports, so they'll at least see it there.

Add to that the fact that even the simplest change (e.g. changing the name of a playlist) results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database' wait upon synchronisation. Sometimes you can add another couple of minutes while the unit downloads the database too. All this over ethernet.

This has got to be a bug. I've never seen a database rebuild take that long. Coupled with your report of the genre/database bug it makes me think that you might have gotten a corrupted database. This is usually a self-repairing phenomenon, and it's very rare, but you might have uncovered a previously-unknown bug which corrupts the database. If this is the case, rest assured that Empeg won't rest until it's fixed. Just look at how doggedly they pursued the "button stick" and "track hiccup" bugs until they were definitely fixed. Something like this would be a high-priority for them, too, because they wouldn't want any other customers to have the same problem.

Add to that the fact that deletion of some playlists actually deletes the tracks within the playlists and the deletion of others doesn't - it just moves them into 'Unattached items' (NB the songs only appeared in _one_ playlist). There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this.

Further confirmation of a possible database-corruption bug. It shouldn't behave this way at all. I've never heard of this happening to anyone else.

Add to that the fact that some updates in emplode don't register as needing to update the Empeg (sometimes I've found this with changing the playlist order and/or adding new tracks. Again, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to this).

Again, that's a bug. If you can give us a series of actions that will reproduce the problem, we'll all try it on our systems and verify if it's a universal bug. Or it could be related to the database bug, above.

It's a shame that even the potentially good (but rather unappealingly named) 'Toilet floor' is ruined by the occasional (once a second ish) black line/flicker across the screen.

This bug has never been reported. Report it officially. Now that Toby's coming on with Empeg as an employee, expect to see any bugs in the visuals worked out in short order.

If you think that one's named poorly, I wanted to name Snakes "Spürm". Dunno why no one went for that one... You can't blame "Toilet Floor" on me, But "Rorshach" and "BorgBeat" were my suggestions. Got a problem with those?

My preferred graphic - 'Infotex dist' has a bug which has been covered before.

Yeah, and I noticed it, too, recently. I thought it had long since been fixed. Make sure to re-report it officially so that Toby can have another look at it.

Now let's move on to the feature requests:

About half of the visuals are naff. About a quarter of the remainder are clever, but I'll never use them. It really should be possible to block out the ones you don't like.

You're not the only one to request this feature. I'm not sure if Empeg is planning on doing anything about it, though.

a) The lack of a subsearch facility (i.e. the ability to search within the result set of a previous search), and b) the lack of the ability to search on playlist.

These are good feature requests, and I agree that they would be very useful.

Now, on to the design of the playlists:

The Empeg forces its own structure on you. While under some circumstances this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make it very difficult to find songs.

I'm not sure how the Empeg forces anything upon you. The playlist tree is totally free-form and you can arrange it however you like. I believe your problem is that you're unhappy with the search features and you don't use the playlists very much. Perhaps you need to rethink your playlist structure a bit.

Agreed that the search functions are limited, but I think you're trying to use the search functions for purposes that it wasn't intended. For example, your specific complaint:

By way of example, I have five Pink Floyd albums. I can never remember what two of them are called (just checked and they're 'Relics' and 'The division bell'). At the moment, if I want to play them, I have to search on artist 'Pink Floyd' and play the whole of the result (all 87 or so tracks). I then put the display into Info:Track and then skip forward until I see the album name I want, then start a new search by source for that album. It should not be that hard.

It's not that hard. On my Empeg, I just go to playlists, press "7" on the remote to go to the "P"s, scroll to "Pink Floyd" (past Pat Metheny, Paula Cole, and Peter Gabriel) and select it, then scroll through the album titles until I find the one I want, then press Enter twice. A lot fewer keystrokes, and more intuitive. Is it just that you don't have any playlists arranged by artist/album?

One thing I noticed about your comments is interesting: Aside from acknowledged bugs, your complaints are all about features that don't exist in other car audio products (visuals and advanced playlist organization/searching). The Empeg is already better than any other car audio product in those areas. Just try doing an alphanumeric search from the driver's seat on any other product. Or try organizing playlists on a CD-ROM-based product.

My point is that on other car audio products, you don't even have those features, so there's nothing to complain about. Agreed that some of these features have room for improvement, and that's why Empeg listens to their customers. Keep your eyes on the software, it'll keep getting better.

___________
Tony Fabris

I love it, Rob. You and I basically formulated the same reply simultaneously. My time stamp is thirty minutes later than yours, though. You win.

___________
Tony Fabris

Rob> Hey ho, guess I'd better respond..

Thanks.

Please don't take this whole thing personally Rob, I tried to put myself in the shoes of somebody who isn't a member of this BB and doesn't know what has been going on in the past. I hope that you'll get more and more of these customers (meaning that I hope you sell lots more Empegs), so these are the kind of queries I suspect you'll be getting.

Me> About half of the visuals are naff.

Rob> We've already stated that visuals will become plug-ins in a future release,

I'm afraid I missed that announcement. I also couldn't find any reference to that on your web site. I apologise for jumping in feet first, but my comment still stands.

Rob> I have to say, you're the first person I've heard slag off the visuals

I'm not slagging them off. I am well aware that personal tastes differ. I am merely commenting as part of my review that I don't like half of them. Perhaps I should have said "uninteresting" or "poor" instead of "naff".

Rob> I was about to say second, but I think the other person was actually you in another thread.

Nope. This is my first comment on the subject.

Of course, the implication of my thinking that half the visuals are poor/naff is that I think that the other half are pretty damn good. The point of my comment was that I wanted a way to block out the ones I don't like.

Rob> I don't see how anyone who has sat and watched Funnel Web for half an hour could find anything negative to say, but I guess it's horses for courses.

Erm. I never said anything about not liking 'Funnel Web'. As it happens, that one would be listed in my top 3.

Me> The Empeg forces its own structure on you

Rob> *cough* *splutter* You are kidding, right? Have you USED any other MP3 players??

No. But I'm sorry, I can't see how that's relevant. I wasn't comparing the Empeg to any other MP3 players.

Rob> I agree that search for playlist would be handy, and should be fairly trivial. I thought it already did this in a way if you set the tags for the playlist, but maybe I imagined it.

My immediate thought when I found I couldn't search by playlist was that since Emplode allowed me to set tags for the playlist itself I could use those. My frustration is this great purely because that didn't work either - "Why can I set the tags, but then not use them to search on" I thought, and more annoyed I became.

Rob> Although you have shot down the UI you haven't made any suggestions for how it could be improved.

Erm...

Have a look here and here.

The reason I didn't include any of these and simply alluded to others was because this piece was meant as a review at 5 days and nothing more.

The other reason you haven't got my big long list is because I have other things to do with the small amount of spare time I've got at the moment.

But... You will get it.

Rob> I think most long standing contributors here will realise that specific well argued suggestions get one of three responses from us - "Yes, we'll do it", "We'd like to do it, but there are reasons why we can't" or "Sorry, you're mad". There have been a lot of suggestions that got response (a).

I apologise for not being a long standing contributor, but as I've only had the unit for 5 days, that's not really been possible. However, I have been reading every post on this board since before I registered here in March. As a long term reader of this BB, I would say that there are also a lot of suggestions which have not been responded to at all.

Me> The Genre/database bug.

Rob> It's a bug.

Thankyou.

Rob> As a new owner I guess you don't realise yet that we put out software releases on a very regular basis, and stuff like this gets fixed quickly.

As a long term reader of this BB, of course I realise this. However, this is not my gripe. How am I to know if:

a) It is a bug, and
b) I'm not doing something stupid

unless somebody responds to the mail and says so.

If it appears to the user that the bugs reporting mailbox is a black hole, then that user is hardly likely to post any more bugs.

Even an automated response saying "Thanks for your report. We will look into it ASAP and we'll be in touch if we need more information from you." would be nice.

Rob> ... Despite the downside, I think the advantage of keeping bugs in the domain of the developers are considerable and issues get dealt with more quickly than if they entered the support database. ...

Absolutely, but unless there's some sort of feedback (even if, as a last resort, it's automated), then I for one am much more unlikely to report more bugs in the future.

Rob> Don't bother sending this bug to support, though. We know about it.

This is going to sound sarcastic whichever way I phrase it, but it's a genuine question:

Apart from you having just said that, how else would I know that this is a genuine bug and is already being dealt with?

Me> To be honest, after demoing it to people, I've had a hard time justifying to them why I've spent so much money.

Rob> Don't ever go for a job in press relations

My comment was not about my skills as a salesman, but purely about how the Empeg sold itself. It was perhaps unfortunate that two people I let loose with it tried to do things which didn't work, but C'est la vie. From when I first saw the Empeg (on /. I think) over a year ago I was sold on it. Maybe if I worked in a room full of techies then there wouldn't have been a problem. As it is I'm a systems manager in the midst of a load of testers and pen pushers.

Rob> Are you really that unimpressed?

With the Empeg? No. I'm not. I was saying that other people were.

With Emplode, yes. I had hoped it would be more slick than it is.

Rob> If you do "get it" and you think it sucks, I can live with that

No. The point is that _I_ do get it. That's the whole reason I joined the queue over a year ago. As I tried to say in my first post, the hardware looks excellent and I'll give a sound-in-the-car review next week (from a very very man-in-the-street-not-at-all-an-audiophile POV).

My disappointment (and it is just that) is that the UI on Emplode (and, to a lesser extent, on the Empeg) either don't exploit the full potential of the hardware in some respects and makes it difficult to realise the full potential of the hardware in others.

Of course, since I've been reading posts here for many months, it's possible that my expectations could have been raised too high.

Me> The Genre bug and lack of sub-search both made people say words to the effect of "Why did you spend so much money on a badly made piece of junk like that"

Rob> Whatever you do, never ever show them a PJB, or an Aiwa MP3 head, or practically any other MP3 player on the market. They'll probably burst a blood vessel.

My point is that the Empeg advertises a Genre search and it should work. In my experience, it doesn't.

I don't know the PJB or Aiwa unit you're talking about (not had a chance to play with a PJB yet, although I am considering one as a travel to work walkman), but I'd put money on the fact that if either of these offered a search by genre function, that function would work.

Me> It's non-intuitative

Rob> You have a point in so much as it works just like Windows Explorer.

It does not work just like WE. If it did, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. There are several differences (e.g. the way drag-and-drop works).

Rob> It's interesting that a number of major MP3 manufacturers have commented that our way of doing things walks all over their brushed-chrome-effect applications, though.

Indeed. I am not surprised. The Empeg is a vastly superior product to all the MP3 products I'm aware of (although there's this Rio home player networkable thing which looks kinda cool ).

Me> for starters, it should be able to emulate the Empeg's creation of virtual playlists

Rob> Why??

1 - It would help in tracking down errors/bugs - the only way I could find about why the player was restarting when I tried to play certain genres was to dump the CSV and do some analysis on that. If Emplode offered a view of virtual playlists, I could have gone into the Genre section, had a looksee and maybe not had to have done the digging with the CSV.

2 - To make it easier to track down in which physical playlist on the Empeg a file exists. Hmmm. Difficult to explain, but let's say that I've been listening to my Empeg and realised that the MP3 sounded dodgy. As it stands, unless I can remember which playlist(s) I put that MP3 into, I can't track it down on Emplode. If I was able to look at the virtual artists playlists, I could see it there and not have to search through each playlist manually.

Rob> I believe Roger is working on something to search for tracks from emplode by tag, but other than that I don't understand what you're getting at.

That would be one solution - at least point 2 could be dealt with that way. A simple search was something I considered, but I believe that showing these virtual playlists (and yes, perhaps coupled with a simple search) is a more complete solution.

Me> results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database'

Rob> It's a bug - it didn't do that a month ago, and all being well it won't do it on the next release.

I mentioned this in the Wish List section, Tony's reply seemed to indicate that this was normal. On re-reading that, I should have stated exactly how long this was taking. Sorry.

Rob> You then go on to mention a number of other bugs (some of which I've never even heard of, have you reported them?) to which my above response applies.

Some of them I'm not even sure are bugs which is why I raised a number of them under the Wish List section.




And Then Tony replied:

Tony> But to be fair, some of those complaints are obvious bugs which will be fixed very soon.

Yes, but the people I was demoing to are used to the Microsoft definition of 'fixed very soon'. Needless to say, this didn't wash with them!

Tony> Even if the mail didn't reach them, you posted it here on Bug Reports, so they'll at least see it there.

I don't mind spending my time writing bug reports for Empeg. I don't mind it even though I paid $1700 for the unit. What I do mind is not getting any feedback (even if it's to say "You stupid idiot" ).

Me> Add to that the fact that some updates in emplode don't register as needing to update the Empeg

Tony> Again, that's a bug. If you can give us a series of actions that will reproduce the problem, we'll all try it on our systems and verify if it's a universal bug.

Strange one that. I've tried to reproduce it again and it worked normally. By the time I got it to repeat the error, I'd forgotten what I'd done. I'll have another play with this tomorrow.

Tony> ... But "Rorshach" and "BorgBeat" were my suggestions. Got a problem with those?

Nope. (BTW, how's about Kitchen Floor instead of toilet floor?)

Me> The Empeg forces its own structure on you.

Tony> I'm not sure how the Empeg forces anything upon you. ... Perhaps you need to rethink your playlist structure a bit.

Heh. It doesn't force anything on me, but I need to rethink my playlist structure a bit. I think you just proved my point

I hear what you say though.

Tony> It's not that hard. ... A lot fewer keystrokes, and more intuitive. Is it just that you don't have any playlists arranged by artist/album?

I guess they will have to be in future. To do it properly, that means reorganising my entire MP3 collection. Erk.

Tony> My point is that on other car audio products, you don't even have those features, so there's nothing to complain about. Agreed that some of these features have room for improvement, and that's why Empeg listens to their customers. Keep your eyes on the software, it'll keep getting better.

You are, of course, absolutely correct. I'm glad I bought the Empeg, even though other people I work with think I'm an idiot for spending that much money.

I apologise to everybody at Empeg who has taken my comments as being anti-them or anti-Empeg.


Nick (who's going for the most number of words in any one posting to the BB).


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Nick,

I don't really want to get into the middle of this because the whole this is coming off as a touchy subject. However, I agree with you, this product is a tough sell to non-techies. People that have stock car radios and don't even have mp3's on their hard drive have a really hard time understanding where we come from. Most of the time when I demo the empeg I show ALL the features and still get a response of "Wow, thats a lot of money." Despite the empeg music capacity there are still people that "just don't get it." There are a lot of people around me that "just don't get it", so I have had to learn to just enjoy my techie toys on my own.

Alex Lear

Me> results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database'
Rob> It's a bug - it didn't do that a month ago, and all being well it won't do it on the next release.
I mentioned this in the Wish List section, Tony's reply seemed to indicate that this was normal. On re-reading that, I should have stated exactly how long this was taking. Sorry.

Are you referring to this reply?

"There should be a fairly short pause for it to rebuild the database and reload it. However, I don't know what you define as "ages". There has been a bug reported by other users where there's a long pause during synchs- about 5 minutes in one report. This is a bug or some other problem and isn't the intended behavior (i.e., it doesn't happen on mine). See if you can find one of these threads and add your report to it."

I guess I, too, should have defined "fairly short pause" as being less than 30 seconds. But I did say that it's a known bug. I guess I just wasn't clear enough that it wasn't normal behavior for a long pause to happen there.

I would say that there are also a lot of suggestions which have not been responded to at all.

You're right, a lot of the suggestions weren't responded to at all. Funny thing is, many of them simply appeared in the software without the Empeg folks saying anything about it. Others were deliberately not implemented because they didn't fit with Empeg's long term plans for the unit. Or perhaps they were good suggestions that would have taken twenty man-years to implement. Or maybe they were just bad suggestions. In those cases, I think it's easier for everyone involved if the Empeg folks don't try to spend too much time defending their choices and just keep quiet about them.

Even an automated response saying "Thanks for your report. We will look into it ASAP and we'll be in touch if we need more information from you." would be nice.

Eeew, yuck. I hate those.


Heh. It doesn't force anything on me, but I need to rethink my playlist structure a bit. I think you just proved my point.

Touché.

___________
Tony Fabris

Most of the time when I demo the empeg I show ALL the features and still get a response of "Wow, thats a lot of money."

Yeah, I've noticed that, too. Funny, because I see the Empeg as being totally worth every penny. (Yes, I got mine second-hand, but I paid almost full price for it and would have paid even more if the auction had gone up.)

I don't know how to get past this barrier. One of my posts has a little calculation related to it, but I don't think this would wash with most folks.

___________
Tony Fabris

I see the Empeg as being totally worth every penny.

I think knowing the "behind the scenes" features of the empeg is what drives the true enthusiasts of the product. To most people, they see a car stereo. To all of us we see a completely customizable, reprogrammable/upgradable computer system, made by a company that operates like most of us, that happends to play mp3's really well. I happen to agree, "It's worth every penny to me too."

Alex Lear

Please don't take this whole thing personally Rob

Its OK, I didn't write the software

I do tend to take reviews and comments relating to the product or company quite personally, but that works to your advantage if I think you have a point. I think many of the developers are much the same, which could explain why I caught Roger sifting through Tony's empeg wishlist to decide what to fix next in emplode :)

I'm sorry, I can't see how that's relevant. I wasn't comparing the Empeg to any other MP3 players.

In a way you're right - it's not relevent because we don't look to other products to determine our own featurelist. I don't think we would even if there WERE any other comparable products. However life is full of comparisons, and what I essentially meant to say was "If you think the empeg restricts your freedom to organise music, you should try the other MP3 players". I think the empeg car player is very flexible indeed.

Maybe part of the problem is that recently the focus has been taken away from the playlist hierarchy itself. The orginal public Beta (Beta 5 I think) had ONLY playlists - no searching at all. If you organised your music in a sensible way this wasn't too terrible a restriction.

Now, the more common way to use the player seems to be to dump all tracks into vaguely arbitrary places, and rely on searching to find what you want. I think this does reflect the direction that the developers are taking the product, but the searching isn't quite good enough to fully support that methodology - yet.

Release 1.1 will include some very whizzy things for the dynamic selection of music, and at that point I could envisage running without any rigid playlist structure.

"Why can I set the tags, but then not use them to search on"

That's a good question. I've never quite understood why emplode brings up a full tags dialog for playlists, although I vaguely recall Mike (the original author of emplode) having a reason for it at the time. I'll have a chat with the developers to see if we can get the dialog trimmed down to contain only stuff that works.

As a long term reader of this BB, I would say that there are also a lot of suggestions which have not been responded to at all.

We do have a policy of not publishing our internal wishlists and future build details. This frustrates some people, but we have good reasons, number one being that we have a very dynamic workload. If an OEM project pops up and pushes a car player feature back by three months, no tears will be spilled if that feature hasn't been promised outside of empeg. Likewise, publishing a wishlist and then not acting upon it in short order can cause great resentment from some parties.

We prefer for new features to be a nice surprise (which also keeps potential competitors guessing), unless it's an urgent or complex issue which warrants discussion in advance.

There is a risk that we could work on avenues that are divergent with the general wishes of our customerbase. An example was the "feature" to disable visuals in-car by default. We didn't anticipate the strength of feeling on that issue, and had to hurriedly implement a compromise (held bottom button). Had that compromise been in place from the start I don't think a significant degree of opposition would have arisen.

This is one of the reasons that we are now forming a client Alpha Test team. About half a dozen clients (selected by us - nobody need self nominate!) will get access to Alpha releases a few days ahead of the public Beta. We will also discuss future plans with them, in a confidential forum. This will give us an opportunity to guage opinion without creating major public uproar, and you'll also get better quality Beta releases (no more rev. A, B, C, D etc etc - hopefully!).

If it appears to the user that the bugs reporting mailbox is a black hole

I wasn't aware, before now, that there was any kind of a problem with the bug reporting system. If there is a problem it is probably because each report is cc'd to a number of developers, and it's up to them to adopt appropriate issues. On Monday I'll look into a way of ensuring that no issue is overlooked or processed without a response.

My point is that the Empeg advertises a Genre search and it should work. In my experience, it doesn't.

Indeed - although I would point out it works fine for me, and I've never heard of this issue before. Assuming you don't have a bunch of tracks with bad tags (e.g. V1/V2 contention issues, as discussed elsewhere) it's a good find, and an essential fix for the next Beta.

the UI on Emplode (and, to a lesser extent, on the Empeg) either don't exploit the full potential of the hardware in some respects

Definitely - and very much by design! We have seriously over-engineered the potential capabilities of the product to future-proof it as much as possible. Even in a year from now I doubt the software will take advantage of everything the product is capable of. In my book, that's something that significantly adds to the value of the product.

You've probably noticed that there is currently no directly comparable OEM version of the car player. OEM's have looked at it, and decided what needs to be removed ("because it's not even used by the software!"), and the result is a very cut down product. That's why we'll continue to make the car player ourselves for as long as there's a demand - we want to maintain a continuously evolving, living project. If the software was actually ever *finished* I don't know what we'd do!

Of course that's not the sort of thing you can say on a corporate web site, but I would hope that most people here will get my point.

Me> for starters, it should be able to emulate the Empeg's creation of virtual playlists
Rob> Why??
1 - It would help in tracking down errors/bugs

Maybe, but that is pretty much our job. You reported a bug with genre searches in a clear and concise way, and now it's up to us to track down what the problem is. If we can't reproduce it here, then we do have the capability to produce debug logs from your system (with your co-operation, of course).

2 - To make it easier to track down in which physical playlist on the Empeg a file exists

The new search feature will accommodate that.

let's say that I've been listening to my Empeg and realised that the MP3 sounded dodgy

We have a much cleaner solution to cope with this (and similar) problems, which I believe is going to be in 1.1.

I don't mind spending my time writing bug reports for Empeg. I don't mind it even though I paid $1700 for the unit. What I do mind is not getting any feedback

I would have to say that my experience is that this is very much the norm for the IT industry. I've lost count of the MAJOR companies we've had to contact with bug reports (some quite serious) without ever getting a reply.

HOWEVER I would go on to say that this is NOT the empeg approach. You have identified a weakness in a customer facing part of the company and I'll get that fixed (even if it is an auto-responder, in the first instance).

BTW, how's about Kitchen Floor instead of toilet floor?)

It's actually supposed to be a dance floor (with flashing lights etc) but perhaps Toby's experience of clubbing has involved a lot of time spent horizontal in the bathroom

Keep the feedback coming!

Rob

I agree with you, this product is a tough sell to non-techies

This isn't a mass market product. It is designed for..

a) Gadget maniacs
b) Linux maniacs
c) ICE maniacs
d) Music maniacs

..and usually a combination of two or more of the above.

On occassions that I've had to sell the concept (but not necessarily a player!) to a non-tech man-in-the-street, it's the capacity that gets them every time.

"100 to 600 hours of music in your dash, all instantly accessible, and no huge boxes full of CD's in the trunk. By the end of the year it will be over 1000 hours."

The usual response is:

"I can see exactly why someone who actually had that much music would want to buy this product!"

The mainstay of the car audio market is still radio/cassette heads, not even CD. Of course those millions of consumers are not going to be sold on mass storage digital audio - at least, not yet!

Rob

My time stamp is thirty minutes later than yours, though. You win

I was late for the pub - so I was motivated to type faster than you

Rob

This isn't a mass market product. It is designed for..

a) Gadget maniacs
b) Linux maniacs
c) ICE maniacs
d) Music maniacs

..and usually a combination of two or more of the above.

Rob, are you sure we haven't met, maybe in some previous life? You nailed me on three out of the four categories.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

I know Rob already commented on this, but I thought I'd add my perspective.

Up until about a year and a half ago, I only had 12 CDs in my collection. Even with only 12 CDs, I only ever listened to about 3 of them in the car cuz it was such a pain in the ass to change them.

CD auto-changers are supposed to help with this, and combined with a good head unit it isn't TOO bad.

But as people get LOTS of music and lots of CDs, even CD auto-changers become a pain in the ass, and I'm sure there has been more than one accident involved with driving and shuffling through 12 CDs of music looking for one song.

I don't recall empeg ever saying they were targeting the whole vehicle population with their target. The empeg car's best feature is it's capacity, in which a select percentage of the population would ever really be able to utilize. Only people with this capacity of music will really be able to catch it's usefulness, as other head units do a fairly good job at what they do (even visuals, and 1/10th the cost).

Demoing the product to people that don't take lots of music into the car with them will have a tough time understanding it's usefullness (and it's value).

I'm not at all suprised that some people will find the empeg car a waste. Hell, all my friends are techies and I'm sure they are going to think I'm green when I get one.

People who are going to want the empeg car are people that are LOOKING for the empeg car (or it's features). And Rob already discussed the people that are in that community. They've already set their target, and it's not for general consumer use.

So if people don't get it, fine. I'm sure the empeg folks were expecting that.

In contrast. MP3 players are spawning rapidly, and I've seen a few. They just don't have what empeg does, and I don't see any that will in my "want" timeframe . I think a lot of the negative comments towards the empeg car are either made without realizing the the options, or expecting something from a product that is unprecedented and unanswered in the market. I'm sure when CD players first came out, a lot of customers probably throttled the "well this sucks if it doesn't do this" stuff. It's kind of hard to put EVERYTHING in from the start.

Kureg

I guess what I'm trying to say in summary is:

Be thankful for what you do have cuz it's the best so far.

Tell your friends that. If they say it sucks cuz it doesn't do something, you can say it does that something 10 times better than anything else out there.

Kireg

This is one of the reasons that we are now forming a client Alpha Test team.

I'd just like to "me too" this great idea. Now how to get on that list.... ;)


Fly me to the moon...

You guys are giving me a big head, you know.

___________
Tony Fabris

I'll pass you a very big hand then Tony ( and well deserved, for all the help you give ), to go with that big head :-)

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 Red S/No.341

Hi,

I don't really want to get into the middle of this because the whole this is coming off as a touchy subject. However, I agree with you, this product is a tough sell to non-techies. People that have stock car radios and don't even have mp3's on their hard drive have a really hard time understanding where we come from. Most of the time when I demo the empeg I show ALL the features and still get a response of "Wow, thats a lot of money." Despite the empeg music capacity there are still people that "just don't get it." There are a lot of people around me that "just don't get it", so I have had to learn to just enjoy my techie toys on my own.

It goes further than that, I believe it boils down to two types of people, one type who embrase, thrive and live for technology (the type that'a buy two empegs!) and the other that live with their heads in the sand and buy their electrical goods from the supermarket because it's on offer and fits the pocket.

I remember sitting around a table in a pub with some friends around 1976, totally hyped about the concept of building a home-brew micro. The looks I got then are the same type of look I get now when some people see the empeg. I guess there will always be people that "get it" and some that "don't"!


Regards,


_________________________________________
John, (MK1 114-20G, MK2 15-36G).

I agree that the empeg player is not for everyone - or more accurately not everyone will "get it". As far as the catagories listed above I fall in to two of those pretty easy. I am a techie by trade, and a music lover at heart. Listening to music is important enough for me to spend the bucks on this product without thinking twice - and most of the general population will not agree with me there.

I originally was looking for a car head unit that would play CDs in an MP3 format. I figured that I could burn my MP3s on CDs, and only have to carry around 3 or 4 CDs in my car then. I still frowned that I had to swap CDs.. although my 3 or 4 CDs was better than 50 or 100 it was not the -total- solution to my problem.

Then a friend forwarded me to the empeg website. This unit solves my problem 100%. All my music at my fingertips, all the time, no disc swapping. Its also open ended - since its a genuine computer (and not just a radio) think of the possibilities that the future will bring.

My point on wanting the empeg is it solves my need for music moreso than the gadgetry. I once discussed this idea with some friends over a beer - "would you rather loose your sense of sight or your sense of hearing" .. I chose sight. I would rather be able to hear than see, music is that important to me. I couldn't drive my car and listen to the empeg, but I could still sit in the garage and not have to worry if I put the right CD back in the correct case.