All this hype about the great new features that were supposed to be in 2.0 final, but i'm not seeing anything really.

Try using 1.03 for a day and then say that!

The hype of which you speak is presumably mainly the hype before the car-player was discontinued? All car-player work since September 2001 has essentially been done in our spare time -- I hope I'm not sounding old-fashioned when I say that, at least as far as I'm concerned, it was a matter of honour not to strand the community on version 1.03, with its various shortcomings. Without official support or scheduling, there were many things we wanted to bring you in 2.0 which we could not. There are even some, hopefully not too irritating, remaining minor bugs in 2.0; such is not the Empeg Way, but under the circumstances making a release sooner rather than later seemed sensible. We all hope that there will be 3.x for the car-player. But the future of Empeg, let alone the car-player, depends on a favourable outcome to Sonicblue's asset sales adventure; we can make no guarantees. Not even Greg Ballard could.

I for one am grateful to Sonicblue for even permitting the skunkworks development of 2.0 (or for turning a blind eye, whichever they did). Other companies might not have been so understanding. Subsequent owners of Empeg might not be so understanding. That is why we needed to release 2.0 now, despite its obvious lack of Vorbis support, cross-fading, automatic self-EQ or voice recognition.

Had Sonicblue lived, we should have had a car-player to tell which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.

Peter