Sixteen years later, my truck finally gave up the ghost. Just over 100k miles, and the engine conked out. The last few years, I've been riding in silence, as the HDs in my player went out, and putting in an SSD hasn't been a (financial) priority. We bought an '18 Subaru Forester, to replace my truck, and along with it, of course, comes a "functional"(*) head unit.

After a decade of the empeg, I had completely forgotten how crappy commercial radio is, with the advertising and DJ commentary. Please, can you just shut up and play music?

I have 3 free months of XM radio, after which... what?

(*) It makes sound come out of the speakers. It is not comparable to the empeg.

Bluetooth from an empeg!

I put an SSD in my 'peg and it was pretty easy. Got a KingSpec 128gb PATA IDE 44 pin off of ebay. Works great so far. Not expensive, it was $76.99 with shipping.

Then my car got crashed into, and it was time for a new one. I was making do with my smartphone for a while, but I really sorely missed some of the 'peg features. In particular, I really missed the ability to un-shuffle around the current song, or for that matter to be able to play anything at all in album sequential order instead of alphabetical song title order, which is the way my smartphone seems to always want to play things.

Then I made my own Bluetooth interface and my own custom mount and fascia in what used to be the sunglasses holder, only possible because I had previously, several years ago, got a display extender kit back when Stu was still selling them.

If you can find a spot in the Subie to mount the 'peg somewhere that you can reach the front panel, you might be a candidate for my last spare BlueGigaEmpeg interface from the current production run, if you're interested.

Mark, have you had a chance to do anything with mounting your unit in your Subaru with the BGE? Anything to report?

My apologies, but your utter work of art (!) is still in the original shipping box on my electronics bench.

Lots of distractions, unfortunately.

-ml

Understand completely about distractions. And thank you very much. :-)

Wait...I have an idea:



(Except I have no idea whether that space is actually wide enough or deep enough for an empeg )

I'm guessing that you've rendered the 'peg at about 75 percent actual size there. :-)

Yeah, I was afraid of that. If the display board itself can fit, I would imagine that some modification could be done to the printable face you designed.

I've been following the BGE development. It's pretty nifty. And I was certainly impressed with the custom mount. The Forester even has a sunglasses drop-down pocket in the center over the windshield, that would be perfect for doing what Tony did -- if I had a display extender (and I could convince SWMBO that I should tear apart a brand new vehicle).

JBjorgen's mock-up is pretty close to what I was thinking. But... the section he has it is actually where the 12v/lighter outlet is, and is only a few inches deep -- that would take some pretty massive cutting. Right underneath that, though, right behind the switches for the in-seat heaters, is a deeper map pocket. I don't think it's wide enough -- I'll get out and measure it tomorrow.

The stock headunit allows a variety of inputs -- via USB, aux-in, or BT. Initial research suggests is the same (or similar) headunit as what's in Honda -- manufactured by Clarion. So the BT might work just fine.

I had my display extender in that position in the Impreza (R.I.H.), which had a layout quite similar to the Forester.

Tight fit even so.

I extended my XM subscription. The cost is worth the lack of commercials, and the DJs are pretty decent.

A Bluetooth adapter for the empeg would be amazing.

I'm assuming you know about the one that Tony developed (with some input from several others on the board here). He may still have some available for sale.

No I didn't... I haven't wandered out of Off Topic or For Sale for about 8 years (since I didn't have the empeg in a car any more), except maybe once or twice. Time to go look!

Here is a better link if you don't want to look at the big development thread:

BlueGigaEmpeg - Bluetooth output for the empeg - Ready

Yeah... I was looking at that more, today. It's possibly deep enough, but not wide enough. Same issue with the central armrest cubby. As best I can tell, there just is no DIN sized space anywhere. Right now, it looks like the only reasonable place to mount it is under one of the front seats. Even then, unless browsing via BT works, it's sort of a 'meh' solution -- it doesn't seem any better than playing files off a USB stick.

I have to admit, I am enjoying it -- but I do hate paying for subscription services. I'm more the buy-it-and-own-it type.

It seems a display extender is the best solution for this kind of situation. I wonder if we could convince Stu to do another production run?

Can we get the band back together to issue an updated and more compact empeg?

Whole thing might be thickness of a candy bar using modern thin display tech and flash storage...

Honestly, my other project idea is to just write an iPhone/Android app which perfectly emulates all the empeg features. Candy bar indeed.

I was planning on doing something like that for the capstone of this CS program. The world (or at least me?) needs empeg functionality back, badly.

I'm currently on vacation with a rental car, and it's so agonizing having to use iPhone apps to play music.

The iPhone idea of "Sequential" playback is to play songs in alphabetical order by song title. Seriously?

Hey, don't blame Steve Jobs just because you didn't have the foresight to set the tags for your MP3 titles correctly, like:

Moving Pictures 01 Tom Sawyer
Moving Pictures 02 Red Barchetta
Moving Pictures 03 YYZ

etc.

(Just kidding! )

tanstaafl.

Yeah that’s what I can’t fathom.

If I tell Siri to play a particular album, I get one of these responses:

“I can’t play <album> because I don’t have an internet connection” despite the fact that the music is in local storage and correctly tagged.

She plays the title track from the album.

She plays random somethings by that artist.

She plays the album I requested in correct sequential album order.

So I know she CAN play songs in proper order sometimes, she just seems to like alphabetical for some godawful reason.

I've had a good experience switching to the iPhone. Mostly positive and I don't see myself switching back.

But Siri is bad. Really bad. It doesn't understand me, it does things I don't want it to do, and it's very inflexible.

This isn't to say that Google's assistant is much better. In fact, I believe Google made it worse when they introduced the AI elements because it started making the assistant respond differently when told the same thing. But it was still much smarter and could translate much better.

Again, I don't see myself going back to Android, but Siri is one of the primary things I dislike about the switch.

Even without using Siri, just working from the phone's own touch screen, I can't figure out how to get the iPhone to do the following things. Since you're working with it successfully, do you know how to do these things?

- Play my entire music library in sequential album order instead of alphabetical order by song title.

- When listening to my music library shuffled, and it hits a song in the middle of an album I want to hear, how to un-shuffle around that song so that the library is now not shuffled and is in album order again.

- While shuffling my entire music library, decide I want to hear a particular single song. Select and play that song. At that point I want it to go back to playing the whole library shuffled again as soon as that song is done. Instead it just keeps repeating that song. How to insert a specific song into a whole-library shuffle?

For something that has its roots in a music player, it's a surprisingly bad music player.

I'd bail immediately if it wasn't for imessage. When Apple gets around to ruining that, I'll try something else.



Siri was usable on IOS6, and has gotten worse with every release since then. I don't use it at all any more, and would turn it off except Apple loves to tie its crap in with things you need, like voice recognition.

Apple peaked at IOS6.

It seems likely that there is something about your music tagging that the iOS music app doesn’t like. I go to the Music app, go to albums, open one, hit play. It plays them in album order.

The Music app used to be really crappy, it got better a couple of versions ago and finally has an on the fly playlist you can insert into/add too. Though it is still far from perfect.

But I think you’ve got tagging problems.

I use Siri all the time for setting timers and creating reminders. For anything else it is too unreliable.

I got an Echo to see how well that worked. I can’t say I was that much more impressed, I just use it for timers

I definitely have no tagging problems. I'm a stickler for that. Every song is tagged with either a correct ID3V1 tag, or, both an ID3V1 and an ID3V2 tag, with proper track numbers. None have bad tags in either the V1 or the V2 slots. Every song has a correct track number.

I wonder, though, if the iPhone only reads the V2 tags and considers V1 to be too out of date to bother with. So maybe when I have album playback order problems, maybe the problem is only happening on the ones which contain only V1 tags.

Another possibility is that I am not able to load my songs onto the iPhone by using iTunes due to this still-unfixed bullshit:


So I had to use a third party program like Media Monkey to load the tunes onto the phone. Maybe that's the issue.



Not my use-case. My use-case is (of course) the empeg style of playing the entire library in album order, and toggling shuffle on and off as I go. I can't see a way to do that on the iPhone. If you know how, though, if there's something I'm missing in the iPhone UI, I'd love to know. I would understand if the iPhone simply "can't do that" though.

In fact, on the iPhone, the only way I can see to play all songs on the iPhone is to go to "songs" and press the first song. When I do that, it plays every song, albeit in alphabetical song title order.



How is that done? If I knew how to do it, maybe it would work for my use-case. But I can't seem to do it. I try to go to playlists and press "new playlist" and press "add music" and press "artists" with the intention of adding all artists. But it doesn't seem to let me select all artists. In fact it seems like I have to drill down in the artists all the way down to individual songs to add them to the playlist one song at a time. So that doesn't work for me: My goal would be (again, the empeg use-case of) having all songs playing in the playlist, shuffled or not, and then insert an individual song so that the playlist continues after that song is done. Looks like that's also not do-able on the iPhone unless there's something I'm missing in the UI.

Nope, that's not the issue.

When I connect to the phone in iTunes and show the music on the iPhone (not on my hard disk), it shows the albums in the correct order; see attached screen shot showing the song titles of the album "Moving Pictures" in the correct order.




Nope. I tried that exact set of steps on my phone with Moving Pictures, and it always plays the songs in some order other than the order shown on the attached screen shot. There is a giant "SHUFFLE" button there on the screen in the iPhone screen and when I press it, it does not seem to successfully toggle shuffle on and off. It seems to just always be shuffled.

Yeah, I just tried it again, here was my steps of things I pressed:

- on iPhone, launch MUSIC app.
- Press LIBRARY in the lower left corner.
- Press ALBUMS.
- Scroll to M.
- Scroll to MOVING PICTURES.
- Press MOVING PICTURES.
- The album "Moving Pictures" comes up on the screen.
- I notice that the song titles are listed in the correct order on that screen in fact. So I have no tagging problems and no uploading problems. The screen says "1. Tom Sawyer 2. Red Barchetta 3. YYZ" etc, exactly like it should. So the iPhone knows the correct album order, it's showing the correct order on the screen. So far so good...
- There are two buttons on the screen, one named PLAY and one named SHUFFLE.
- Press the button titled "PLAY".

First track that plays is "The Camera Eye" rather than "Tom Sawyer". GAH.

It doesn't seem to matter if I press the button titled "PLAY" or the button titled "SHUFFLE", either way I don't get the album playing back in album order. In fact, even if the thing that I press is "1. Tom Sawyer" instead of "PLAY", it still doesn't play the songs in album order.

So this thing just doesn't like to play albums in album order, despite the fact that it knows the order and displays it for me on the screen. I have no idea how it works for you. Are you pressing something different than what I just listed?

Followed your exact steps and it works fine for me.

EDIT: IPhone SE, songs either loaded by iTunes or downloaded direct from iTunes Store.

Much of what you described in your use case works as you want on my iPhone on my library.

Note, I didn’t say you tagging was bad or wrong, I said the iOS app didn’t like it. When I first started transcoding my flacs to mp3s it took a bit of tweaking of the tags until iTunes worked well with them.

And yes, the on the fly stuff is very much there.

I think however it only works for whole albums (on MacOS it works for individual songs):

- start playing whole library (from albums screen)
- go and find a new album
- open the screen for it
- tap on the three dot button
- tap play next

You are now in up next mode, if you tap on a single song now it will ask you if you want to clear the up next playlist or not.

I believe however you are stuck with only play now, not play next. And it plays the song you select AND the rest of the album it is in before carrying on with your existing up next playlist.

You are now

I tried to take a video to show all this, but audio playback doesn’t work I when you use the screen recording feature is on.

P.S. the empeg way of operation you described was not how I used my empeg &#128521;

You can add single songs, and chose to play next or add to the end. You need to 3D Touch on a song and you get a pop up (or long tap on devices with no 3D Touch).

You can reorder the up next playlist too, just swipe up on the now playing screen to see the playlist and drag to rearrange.

To show we aren’t making it up , here I am playing all albums, switching to shuffle, changing track, switching back out of shuffle, ending back in album order:

https://youtu.be/Y6PBQiLnAD4

I should have been clearer. My mostly positive experience has been with the phone overall, but I've never used the music player. I subscribed to Apple Music, but didn't like the player much so I stayed with Google Play Music for now.

I gave up handling a music library years ago. I was never as advanced as you all are at programming your music and altering playlists like you do. I [sadly] don't even listen to music as much anymore, and podcasts have taken the lion's share of my music time.

AHA!!!!!!

YOUR VIDEO SHOWED THE SECRET.

There was a secret screen I was missing all along. Hidden, no indication it was there. You have to do a secret special scroll to see it, with no indication that it's there at all.

This solves most of the problems, but boy would I like a private meeting with the person who designed that UI. Preferably in a soundproof room.

'Cause apple stuff has always been so intuitive! (Especially dragging a floppy disk to the trash to eject it. Yeah, I still haven't gotten over that one...)

-jk

This is why I use the Denon music player app. You'd have thought that the company that invented the ipod would be able to make a decent music app.

The Karma was soooooo much better.

I've used an iPhone for more than 4 years, but the iTunes and music playing experience was getting so frustrating. Some playlists would play, others would not. Getting tracks onto the player was a pain. I tried alternatives to iTunes, but those weren't all that either. And don't get me started on the tagging. iTunes demanded some specifics that had never been necessary before, like filling in the "Album Artist" field, or all the tracks of a same album would get scattered around in my library and not be contained in the same album as they should (very strange: iTunes seemed to ignore the the "Album" field - which would mean I would have to re-tag all of my 40.000+ files. No thank you)

So in an attempt to preserve my mental health, I switched to Android (Samsung S8).
And I found Android -for my use case- to be better than iPhone ever was. I can now simply copy the mp3's to my phone using Windows Explorer. I can keep my own folder structure. Android finds the files and plays them correctly. About the only thing I miss is an easy way to create playlists on the PC, but I can live with that.

There was a time that iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead of Android, but in my opinion this is no longer the case. I was very pleasantly surprised with my current phone's features and simply love it. I still have a lot of respect for Apple for paving and showing the way, but IMO Android has surpassed them by now.

Sigh.

I am currently using Android, but that would make me switch to iPhone if it was only available there (or vice versa); that's how much I miss the Empeg feature set. Seriously.

Agreed so very much!
When it comes to my smartphone, this is probably my biggest wish left...

This seems to be a case of making the ui just a bit too clean. The scroll bar indicator only shows when actively scrolling. Leaving no real indication that scrolling is possible.