Oh, where to begin, where to begin? I ordered my EMPEG one week ago, late Saturday night. On Wednesday, it arrived. I spent Wednesday night discovering that (a) my Linux box's serial ports don't work and (b) there's an obscure bug in the DHCP support of the EMPEG when used with a Linksys DSL Router. An e-mail exchange with Mike Crowe ultimately led me to hook up a Windows-running laptop, with a working serial port, and to assign a static IP address until the next software rev from EMPEG comes out to fix the DHCP bug. Fair enough. Thursday night I told emptool "here's a directory with 10GB of MP3's, please download them". I went to bed. Friday morning, there it all was. I hooked the EMPEG to my home stereo and it worked like a champ. Today, I had some non-techie friends over for breakfast and was using the EMPEG as a jukebox. One guy, a professional DJ, was deeply impressed. Three women concluded I had far too many toys.

On Monday, I have an appointment with a local stereo installer. This is apparently going to be quite tricky because BMW designs its stereos to maximally complicate installation. Not only are none of the connectors compatible with anything, but the voltage levels BMW uses are non-standard. My installer tells me he ordered the appropriate adapters and may have to put in a small amplifier between the EMPEG and my built-in amplifier. I'll post more on this later. At any rate, the red color looks like it will match the BMW just fine. It also looks quite nice against my Yamaha home stereo, which uses orange and red in its displays.

Meanwhile, I definitely enjoy my new toy. Comments in no particular order:

- I find myself using the normal "Info" screens, not the visuals. I've got enough stuff in there that it's really nice to see who is singing what. I strangely find myself liking the Analog VU Meter visual. It's the simplest one there, but it has that sort of retro look to it.

- The power-off LED is amazingly bright. Is there some way to disable it? I don't want it drawing particular attention from some car stereo thief.

- This has been discussed elsewhere, but the EMPEG needs to have GUI stuff to let you see and manipulate its network settings. These would go in the "Info" menu and would work similarly to how you set the date and time.

- The advanced search and the visual selectors have this one-way business where you keep hitting the single button and the EMPEG goes to the next dialog or visual. If you shoot past what you want, you have to loop all the way around. It would be nice to use the left/right buttons so you can go back and forth.

- EMPEG desperately needs a custom remote control with buttons having different shapes and sizes. "Direct OK", "DNPP" and "CD-MD-CH" (used to select advanced search, visual, and info display, respectively) are all adjacent and I find myself regularly hitting the wrong button. Even having legends saying "Visuals" and "Disp. Info" on the current remote would be an improvement.

- The EMPEG display's fonts are quite readable, even from across the room. However, characters with accents (e.g., "Rubén González") come out looking just awful, cutting off the bottom half the accented character.

- The "Info: Now & Next" is quite useful, but it would be even better if it showed the previous track, then the current one, and a couple subsequent tracks. This way, if you miss a track's the title, and your EMPEG has gone on to the next track, you need not disturb listeners by hitting the "previous track" button.

- emptool happily imported files that weren't MP3s. I had a bunch of junk in my mp3 directory (HTML files, m3u's, etc.) that were happily uploaded, appear in playlists, but don't do anything. emptool should probably check if the file is something bogus and not bother copying it over.

- emptool really needs word completion, as done in every major Unix shell.

- I could never get emptool's 'move' command to do anything useful. Is it meant to work like the Unix 'mv' command? I ended up flipping back and forth between emptool on Linux and emplode on Windows for stuff. emptool was useful for bulk operations ('rm *.m3u' to clean up the above mess) and emplode was useful for managing playlists.

- emptool should support m3u files, turning them into EMPEG playlists.

- emptool should use ID3v1.1 track IDs to determine the order of tracks. I have one directory per album and all the tracks have track numbers. It would be nice if the ordering were preserved. As it is currently, I've had to manually reorder tracks for a couple albums where it really matters.

- Distant wish list item: it would be cool to have some way of giving feedback to the EMPEG on what tracks you like and what tracks you don't. Then, in addition to randomly re-ordering tracks, you could have a random ordering biased toward having favorite tracks earlier.

- Another distant wish list item: it would be cool to add a track to any playlist on the fly, from the GUI. "This cut of 'Take The A Train' is pretty good. It should be on my set list for when I next DJ our local swing night." Or, conversely, "everybody hated the last track I played; delete it from my set list for future reference."

- This was mentioned earlier, but to use the EMPEG as a semi-autonomous DJ device, I'd need to be able to say "here's a playlist, go" and be able to field specific requests ("Hey Dan, can you play Slim Gaillard's `Tip Light' next?"). As far as I can tell, new tracks can only be added to the end of a playlist, and editing the playlist causes the player to momentarily pause playback. I guess I want the pauses fixed, and I want the advanced search to have a new mode that appends after the current song, not just the end of the playlist.

Coming in future installments of my review (hey kids, don't touch that dial!):

- Installing the thing in my car. Learning precisely how much bending over backward will have been required to satisfy the evil stereo designers at BMW.

- Picking a couple songs I know well, encoding each one ten different ways with lame, and doing a double-blind listening test to see what bitrate is sufficient to make me a happy camper.


Wheee!

Dan (Ser# 08000131, Queue# 13700, 12GB Red)

The power-off LED is amazingly bright. Is there some way to disable it?

Hugo's made some noises about wanting to make that configurable. I'm all for it, too.

EMPEG desperately needs a custom remote control with buttons having different shapes and sizes.

There have been some noises about this, too. They've wanted to do their own remote for a long time, but haven't been able to get it into production quite yet. In the meantime, you get used to the Kenwood remote pretty fast- give it a few days.

The EMPEG display's fonts are quite readable, even from across the room. However, characters with accents (e.g., "Rubén González") come out looking just awful, cutting off the bottom half the accented character.

I'd love to be able to edit the fonts, personally. Hugo once said that he might release a tool which lets you convert images into fonts. That would be so fun. Then you could see if you could do a better job on those characters with a limited number of pixels...

The "Info: Now & Next" is quite useful, but it would be even better if it showed the previous track, then the current one, and a couple subsequent tracks.

I'm going to fight you on this one. I would prefer either a) having five lines of future song titles back (we lost one somewhere during the beta 11 series), or b) have four lines plus a line that scrolls detail data on the current song.

emptool happily imported files that weren't MP3s. I had a bunch of junk in my mp3 directory (HTML files, m3u's, etc.) that were happily uploaded, appear in playlists, but don't do anything.

Emplode doesn't do that any more. Emptool has been open-sourced, so go write your own file filter.

emptool should support m3u files, turning them into EMPEG playlists.

I'd like to see this for Emplode...

emptool should use ID3v1.1 track IDs to determine the order of tracks.

This would be nice for Emplode as well (as discussed elsewhere, along with filename sorting if track numbers are included in the file name).

Distant wish list item: it would be cool to have some way of giving feedback to the EMPEG on what tracks you like and what tracks you don't.

Everyone talks about this "voting" thing, and I just don't see how that would be a good thing for me. If the song sucks, I don't put it into the player. If the song is marginal, it goes in for the purpose of variety. If I voted on every song, then I'd only end up listening to about 1/8 of my collection because it'd never play any of my non-favorite songs. Part of what makes the Empeg cool is that it brings your collection back to life, and lets you hear songs that you might not have gone out of your way to listen to. I've gotten a new appreciation for certain albums because of this.

Another distant wish list item: it would be cool to add a track to any playlist on the fly, from the GUI.

With the limited display and UI, I don't see this being an easy process that you'd want to do while in the car. The whole idea of Emplode is so that you can do all your playlist editing while sitting safely behind the wheel of a desk.

With that said, a work-around that you'll see in 1.1 is the ability to "tag" a given track for future attention. You could mark that track while driving, then when you get home it'll be flagged and you can say "oh yeah, I wanted to put that song on that party mix playlist" and do it... safely.

I guess I want the pauses fixed, and I want the advanced search to have a new mode that appends after the current song, not just the end of the playlist.

I'm with you on that one. Right now we have two modes: "Search by" and "Append by", what we need is a third "Insert by" mode. This has been requested elsewhere.

Picking a couple songs I know well, encoding each one ten different ways with lame, and doing a double-blind listening test to see what bitrate is sufficient to make me a happy camper.

Something I've noticed in my experience: Your favorite, most well-known songs are not necessarily the best ones to use for this test. Your favorite song might not exhibit certain artifacts, whereas a less-loved tune might artifact all over the place at the same bitrate. Plus, you'll find out that whatever bit rate you're happy with at first, your ears will get better and you'll start to notice artifacts more and more as time goes on. For a while I was fine with 128 or the middle VBR bitrate in AC. Then I started hearing artifacts after I got used to the sound of the system in the car, and now I'm backfilling at higher bitrates.

Oh, and ten is WAY too many to do a comparison, you'll get very fatigued. Three is the maximum you'd want to do.

___________
Tony Fabris

A few comments to your suggestions......

I think the standby LED should be turned off in the car. It can attract too much attention. The other night I came out to my car in someones driveway. It was pitch black out but not hard to find the car because I could actually see a green pulsing glow from the interior. Wow that's bright! A simple fix to this is to pull the empeg an inch out of the bay to cut power. Most of the time it is pulled out anyway but there are certain cases where it is not appropriate to take it with me.

I never liked the analog VU meter plugin for winamp but on the empeg it is my favorite too. Weird how one of the most simple visualizations can have such an appeal.

I find myself wanting to see the previous song on "Now and Next" also but I'm not sure if I want to give up a "next" line for it.

Alex Lear

The "Info: Now & Next" (..) would be even better if it showed the previous track, then the current one, and a couple subsequent tracks.

(..) fight you on this one. I would prefer either a) having five lines of future song titles back (..) or b) have four lines plus a line that scrolls detail data on the current song.

Suggestion: make the play list fully scrollable with a pointer ( e.g. '>' ) to identify the current track and an indicator how far (back or ahead) you're from the currently played song.

Henno
mk2 6 nr 6

I like that suggestion Henno because then you could look way ahead without interrupting the music.

Alex Lear

Follow-up: the EMPEG is now happily installed in my BMW Z3 (pictures coming soon). The install went very smoothly. I dropped the car off, went across the street to have lunch, and it was done when I got back. The EMPEG is recessed by maybe 3mm into the dashboard (whereas the factory stereo was flush), but it's not really a very big deal. Sound quality is excellent. Because the EMPEG puts out 3v line level and the BMW amp expects something like 5v, my maximum volume isn't as high as I might like. To get a comfortable listening level, I've got the EMPEG running at 0dB and occasionally up to its "overdrive" maximum. I'm going to run with this for a while and see if it's good enough, otherwise I'll look at putting some kind of small amplifier in there (most likely at the same time as the tuner module arrives). Also, as advertised, the EMPEG's display isn't terribly visible when driving during the day. It's about half the brightness of the car's normal gauges. Still, you can read the display, which is what really matters.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping the tuner module isn't much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. My installer said it's pretty tight in there, with room for maybe two cigarette packs, max. This gets even uglier if I have to sandwich the aforementioned line amplifier into the same space. Anybody know of a really small four-channel car amplifier? My installer says Pinnacle used to make one, but they discontinued it.

Both my installer and a friend of his who was hanging out at the store were very impressed by the EMPEG, never having seen anything like it before. His buddy choked when I said what it cost, but this is a shop that regularly installs multi-thousand dollar custom car stereo systems. I asked the guy whether he thought he'd be seeing a lot more EMPEG boxes, and he figured people wouldn't want weird British stereos, but would wait for the Japanese to start cranking them out (specifically citing the Kenwood and Aiwa). I had to do the math for them to compare a 12GB hard drive to a 600MB CD-R inside the Aiwa and Kenwood units. Apparently, this guy is an Aiwa dealer and he's still waiting for the MP3 Aiwa's to arrive.

So, summing up, I definitely recommend River Oaks Car Stereo in Houston. The install cost me $75 ($50 labor plus parts "and it's a good thing I had that BMW tool to pull your old head unit"). I can also conclude that it's going to be a while before "normal" car stereo people really begin to understand what the EMPEG is all about.

Lastly, I think EMPEG is in a fine position for the future of in-car audio. I was playing with some of the other expensive car stereos in the store's display and the EMPEG basically blows them all out of the water, with the exception of its monochromatic screen (one Pioneer was essentially swimming in pretty colors -- distracting to me, but I'm sure they sell well). It's only a matter of time before some of the Japanese vendors put EMPEG software on their own hardware.

More follow-up: with my EMPEG hooked to my home stereo playing the same track as my CD player from the original CD, I noticed a couple things when listening with my good headphones (Grado Labs SR60's) and switching back and forth:

- to match the volume exactly, I had to set the EMPEG to its maximum volume (+10dB "overdrive"). This means that, either my Yamaha CD player is loud or the EMPEG is quiet (or that the MP3 encoding is droppng the signal by 10dB!). While it didn't happen on my test song, on other songs the EMPEG's internal line amp can clearly be heard clipping when set at +10dB volume. I haven't been able to hear any clipping at +0dB volume.

- there are occasional pops and clicks in the MP3, most likely from my cruddy CD-ROM drive (soon to be replaced with a nice Plextor, after which I'll re-rip everything)

- I could distinctly hear the high-frequency cut-off from my MP3 encoder (on this track: lame, v3.70, 128kbit CBR), particularly with wire brushes on drums. I'd never heard this from my computer's sound card, so chalk one up for the EMPEG there.

Otherwise, I didn't hear much in the way of "artifacts" (or at least that I couldn't attribute to the high-frequency cut-off). Once I can get WAV support on my EMPEG, I'll do some more controlled studies. Right now, I'm not really comparing apples-to-apples and I'm not doing a double-blind study, either.

Stupid feature request that will never see the light of day: say I've got a playlist of tracks that I know are all the "same" song but encoded differently. It would be great to treat them as if they were the same song and let me play them all "simultaneously" (e.g., seamlessly flip from one encoding to the same offset in another). Given that they're all different bitrates (and CBR vs. VBR), this feature would be a pain in the rump to actually implement, and would never match up quite perfectly. However, given the EMPEG designers' propensity for geeky features, you never know what's going into production next.

Stupid feature that will never see the light of day

Might be stupid but it's cool. I never thought of something like that. It would be a really good way to test out different encodings. I hate starting from the beginning of a song to try to hear differences.

Alex Lear

While it didn't happen on my test song, on other songs the EMPEG's internal line amp can clearly be heard clipping when set at +10dB volume. I haven't been able to hear any clipping at +0dB volume.

Right, 0db is the loudest the empeg can go without clipping. Above that it is genuinely clipping the output waveform, so you should expect to hear clipping above 0db. That's the definition of "overdrive".

Why it's quieter than your CD player, I don't know.

- there are occasional pops and clicks in the MP3, most likely from my cruddy CD-ROM drive (soon to be replaced with a nice Plextor, after which I'll re-rip everything)

You could try WinDAC32 (Digital Audio Copy) or EAC (Exact Audio Copy). Both of those have pretty decent ripping engines which, if you turn on their sector synchronization features, will eliminate the pops and clicks.



___________
Tony Fabris

This means that, either my Yamaha CD player is loud or the EMPEG is quiet

hmmm... Is this a CD player hooked up to an external amp? Does the CD player have amplified outputs? Forgive me if I am stating the obvious, but my CD player has both amped and non-amped outputs... I hooked the wrong ones into my amplifier and is was overly loud. (?)

And I really like your "Stupid Feature Request." Light of day or not, it would be a cool feature to play with... I'd like to add different codecs as well!

CD players are generally around 2v output, as compared to other line-level stuff (tuners, tape decks) which are usually 1v-ish levels. Something to do with a hangover from older DACs which simply couldn't get 16 bit resolution with a lower voltage range due to noise - so they pumped up the volume above normal stereo components. Possibly some early ones were 2.56v output.

Hugo

I don't think it has a lot to do with old DACs; problem was (is) CD's large dynamic range and that above 0dB you go into digital clipping which sounds horrible; no "gentle" distortion here; above 0dB is sudden and serious distortion zone.

Subjectively, a regular tuner sounds as loud -and depending on station*- or even louder than a CD player on an identical line-level input in a regular system. This is because of its limited dynamic range and capability to exceed 0dB once and a while without one really noticing it.

Nominal level on most CDs is often at -20dB or more to allow for high, short transients; this brings subjective level in line with more traditional line-level sources.

These high transients are also the main reason why often level normalisation of MP3 files still doesn't give the desired result and you keep fiddling the volume control going from one song to the next, particularly with decent recorded orchestral music, by the way.

*: Many radio station heavily compress their broadcasts specifically with in-car listening in mind. In the UK, worst (or best, depending on point of view) example has to be Classic FM which makes liberal use of Optimods...

Oh well, thought you might wanna know...

Cas

tfabris: You could try WinDAC32 (Digital Audio Copy) or EAC (Exact Audio Copy). Both of those have pretty decent ripping engines which, if you turn on their sector synchronization features, will eliminate the pops and clicks.

I used cdparanoia, which is about as good as it gets. Still, if your CD-ROM sucks (mine is a generic "40x" drive), the best paranoia in the world won't perfectly solve the problem. There seems to be some agreement that higher-end drives like the Plextor completely solve the problem (and run dramatically faster as well).

bootsy: hmmm... Is this a CD player hooked up to an external amp? Does the CD player have amplified outputs? Forgive me if I am stating the obvious, but my CD player has both amped and non-amped outputs... I hooked the wrong ones into my amplifier and is was overly loud.

It's a normal home stereo setup. Yamaha receiver and CD player (both about two years old), and the CD player is outputting "normal" line level. This particular model of CD player doesn't have a volume adjustment.

altman: CD players are generally around 2v output, as compared to other line-level stuff (tuners, tape decks) which are usually 1v-ish levels. Something to do with a hangover from older DACs which simply couldn't get 16 bit resolution with a lower voltage range due to noise - so they pumped up the volume above normal stereo components. Possibly some early ones were 2.56v output.

So if current CD players are outputting 2v line levels as a historical accident (backward compatibility?), maybe future EMPEG hardware should do the same thing for the same reasons. Of course, if you assume people will stop using all other stereo components once installing the EMPEG, then it doesn't really matter.

I used cdparanoia, which is about as good as it gets. Still, if your CD-ROM sucks (mine is a generic "40x" drive), the best paranoia in the world won't perfectly solve the problem. There seems to be some agreement that higher-end drives like the Plextor completely solve the problem (and run dramatically faster as well).

Sometimes it pays to shop around and try different rippers with your CD drive. I've got a particular drive on my NT box at work which flatly refuses to work properly with any software other than WinDAC32, and I've tried several.

And if you're in the market for new drives, may I suggest the new Ricoh drive which is a CD, CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD-ROM all rolled into one. I am very pleased with it. On my home system, it does a fantastic ripping job, very fast and error-free. I am able to use its bundled Adaptec EasyCD Creator program to extract audio tracks from it while doing other stuff in the foreground, and haven't had an error yet. Plus, it runs all the new game CDs quite well (my previous drive had trouble with some of the new copy protection schemes), and plays great movies.

___________
Tony Fabris

The "stupid feature request" is a pretty cool idea. It would allow the users to do simple A-B-A tests across different CODECS and bit rates. mmm!! excellent!

Calvin

I now have a picture of my installation if anybody's interested to see it. Yeah, it's blurry. We'll try again later.

Also, my friend with the digital camera could be described as "fidgety". She was blasting away at the EMPEG while I was trying to drive. One problem comes up if you just changed the volume with the knob and then immediately want to change the track. The left/right buttons are interpreted as changing the volume. You either have to hit the up button to cancel the volume-change mode, or you have to wait. For my fidgety friend, this proved annoying.

Feature request: If you change the volume with the knob, parse the left/right button clicks in their top-level context (track skip, fast forward, rewind, etc.) rather than as volume controls.

I mentioned the volume thing a few weeks ago. I bet it will be fixed soon.

Alex Lear

Just for interest - What faceplate-color did you order? Amber or red? (If it's amber and my monitor is calibrated right then it's more amber than mine is.)
What are the very bright red and blue lights under the heat-control for?

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

This is the "red" faceplate. I dorked with the color balance of the picture to try to make it look right (the original had a red cast across the whole picture), but it ain't really amber. BMW-o-philes can look at the clock and air controls to calibrate their eyes to BMW red.

What are the very bright red and blue lights under the heat-control for?

Those are the A/C and recirculate buttons which are, indeed, amazingly bright. The digital camera just washed them out entirely.

Amusing factoid: I posted this at the same time to the EMPEG board and to bimmer.org last night. 37 people have visited from EMPEG and 17 people have visited from bimmer.org.

That's an awesome picture. The empeg looks like it goes really well with the car, especially the faceplate color matching the rest of the dash lights. Nifty.

Feature request: If you change the volume with the knob, parse the left/right button clicks in their top-level context (track skip, fast forward, rewind, etc.) rather than as volume controls.

YES. YES. And the same problem exists if you're using the remote control to change the volume and then you hit the track skip buttons.

___________
Tony Fabris

The red really looks nice and this is what would match my car's dash-color better than the amber. Unforunately a faceplate is not too cheap - Maybe there are some people out there who are not comfortable with their red one and would better like the amber - what about an exchange?

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

dpkg-deb -x extracts..

type dpkg-deb --help

-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

Errrrrrrrrmmmm..... Which post did you mean by that???

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

dpkg-dev program is what you'd use to exctract files out of a debian image without actually installing it..
-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units