V2 was a development branch specific to the car player, which was a supported product at that time. Testing, debugging and all those good things were carried out and the resultant v2-final is very stable as a result.

V3 is a sort of bonus release. Its development branch was dedicated to the Rio Karma and other new products. Keeping the car player target alive was a personal undertaking for some of the developers, who largely put in the necessary effort in their own time (and who had a software manager who tolerated/encouraged this!). We wanted to release from that branch because it has a whole new audio path, support for additional formats, and many new features over V2. However there was no official testing and no official sanction from the owners of the codebase (at that time) to do any of this for the car player. The most recent V3 releases were developed as specials to coincide with owners meets, thanks to a few individuals (notably Peter and Dave) giving up their weekends to do this. Now, from what I hear, even the V3 branch has been deprecated, tucked up, and put to bed - perhaps permanantly.

I would be surprised if there is another release - and if there is, it will be thanks to an individual digging out the code and putting in their own time to work on it. As there are increasingly few empeg developers remaining at Sigmatel (who own the code), this seems unlikely. I'd like to be proved wrong.

In practice, I choose to run V3 (and have done so for the last couple of years) as its quirks are fairly well understood and are generally easy to avoid or work around.

Rob