Another question, it appeared to stop compressing for about two minutes after I played a song it then started back up again. Does it stop compressing when I play something on the HD?

It shouldn't stop, but it will be going slower, as playback (obviously) takes priority over compressing. The only things that pause compression completely are (i) ripping, and (ii) the synchronise phase of an emplode connection.

In case anyone's interested, the reason for the first of those is that ripping and compressing contend really badly for IDE bandwidth if you try and do them both at once. And, because task priorities only affect CPU sharing -- not sharing of other resources such as IDE -- changing the priorities wouldn't help.

Does it stop playing when emplode is running?

No, unless you use emplode to delete the track it's currently playing...

Peter