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