1. The unit completely ignores track information in the ID3 tag.
(...)
2. When selecting an artist, albums are ignored.

Heh, not only does it ignore the track information, it sorts everything alphabetically by song title, and ignores file names.

On my hard disk, I don't have any track numbers in the tags. I have all my file names include the track number, but the tags don't.

If the Receiver would sort the file names alphabetically instead of the track titles, I'd be able to at least listen to my albums sequentially.

The developers are aware of this as a general issue. It's possible that there may be more options for sorting in a future release, I'm not sure.

Anyway, the temporary work-around for you is to create playlists. It will play playlists sequentially, so you can create a playlist for any albums you want to listen to in sequence.


3. When playing music pressing the menu button takes you right back to select music menu. It should take you one step back.

Funny, the users of their other product (the empeg car) have been asking for this exact feature as well. The trade-off is UI simplicity versus convenience for power-users like you.

Keep asking, they hear you (they read this BBS). They might just implement it, who knows?

4. When selecting a single song by artist, album, title, whatever, you can’t press << or >> to get to the pervious or next song in that category selection.

I like this idea. Select a single song, but after the selection is done, you are within the list of X, with X being the menu you selected to get to the song. For instance, if you dug down to that song via the "artist" menu, then when you finish that song, you'll be in that artist's list. If you dug down through the album menu, you'll be in that album's list.

. I would love an incremental scan of the drive(s) at some interval.

Yeah, that would be nice. What would be even nicer is if the server software could unobtrusively detect changes in the files on your music folders as they happen. I'm pretty sure there's a way to do this in the Windows API somehow. For instance, I use a program to help reverse-engineer installs called "In Control". One of its options is to detect file changes "as they happen" on the hard drive without fully re-scanning the drive. I don't know how it does it, though.

At that point, it would also be great if it could simply be a service that runs in WinNT/2K/XP.

This is a known issue. One of the long-term plans is to make a way to run the server as a service. I haven't tried SRVANY with it yet, but since it needs to interact with the status bar, it may or may not work.

7. Display layout preferences should be set in the PC software.

I disagree. But I think that what SHOULD happen is that the display layout preferences for each Receiver on the network should be "remembered" by the server. So if you change it on the Receiver, it's always the same when you turn it on again. In fact, I assumed it DID that. Doesn't it?

Right now to read the display I have to get right down in front of it.

Yeah the display could be a little brighter, couldn't it?

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Tony Fabris