I've had my player for a week and I love it. I have a few minor quibbles and suggestions, but my one major gripe is that I can't download files back to my computer from the player.

I saw this question addressed by Empeg somewhere - I can't remember where - and it was just dismissed by referring to vague "legal" reasons. I'm not a lawyer, but it I can't imagine what legal reasons those might be. The player is just a removable mass storage device, like any other. The makers of removable hard drives, Jazz drives, CD-R burners, and so on don't place any restrictions on their products, and it's just as easy to use one of those for transferring MP3 files. There's no legal reason you can't copy your (legally owned) MP3 files to nay one of the many other removable mass-storage devices on the market - why does Empeg think the player is any different? What's the difference between the player and any other such device? You don't see them putting artificial limitations on their products.

The "legal" argument just doesn't cut it. I'm rather annoyed by this - I paid quite a lot of money for the player, and it has an extremely useful potential function that I could make great use of. It irritates me that for no valid technical reason, I'm prevented from using a huge portion of the functionality. I'm not a (very good) programmer, but it seems that enabling downloads from the player would be less than trivial.

Sure, one of the big reasons for removing this restriction is for music transfer, but there are other reasons. For all the money I spent on the player, it's pretty irritating to think that I may have to spend even more money to buy a device to do something which I could easily do with the player, were it not for silly and unnecessary restrictions. There are many, many occaisions where it would be extremely useful to be able to use to the player to move files of many kinds - not just MP3's - around. Since I already have the hookups installed at home and office, the player is the perfect substitute for a stack of floppy disks, and would enable me to easily move large files back and forth. Why not put that latest cool game demo on the player so I can take it home?

And, of course, it's a royal pain in the ass to have to keep two separate music archives. Like many people, I imagine, I spend some time at work ripping, encoding, and tagging MP3s, and some time doing it at home. One of the nice side-effects of this is that I have the music available for listening on my hard drive without necessarily having to get the player from the car. But due to this artificial restriction, I only have half my music library available at any time. If I'm at home and I want to listen to a particular song I encoded at work, I'm out of luck unless I want to go out to the car, bring the player in, and hook up all the connections. This also makes backups a much bigger pain (since I would have to buy two separate backup devices).

In short, the restriction on copying files down form the player is completely unnecessary and prevents me from using an extremely nice side-benefit of having spent all that money on the player. There's no legal reason for it. And, Empeg, if you really feel you must be needlessly paranoid about MP3s, then simply have the software check the file fingerprint for MP3s, block those only, and let us at least transfer files of other kinds. But that would be a major unnecessary kludge.

Empeg guys, you are very cool and make a great product. But given the zillion other mass storage devices on the market which don't have this limitation, the restriction is completely unnecessary and short-changes your customers in a very big way. Instead of quietly restricting things while mumbling the magic words "legal issues", you should have the data-transport ability of the player listed as a major selling point.