There seem to be one or two problems with the new Search By Title/Artist in beta8. First, it seems I'm unable to enter a blank (space) character. I tried pressing 1, but this seems to not match anything - or am I missing something here? If not, may I suggest you use 1 to match any special characters, like blanks, apostrophes, exclamation marks, hyphens, braces etc. I have a lot of songs starting with "A " (A Hard Day's Night, A Fine Romance, A Kind Of Magic etc), and currently I can't enter more than the first letter. This takes me to the next point: I found out (and I like this) that a leading "A " or "The " in the song title or artist name are ignored, so I can find "A Fine Romance" by pressing 346 ("f" "i" "n") on the remote. However while the "A" is ignored in the search, it's still highlighted in the result list. I think the highlighting should start with "f" here as well. Next - and most important - point is that when I search for songs starting with "A", the ones starting with "A " (that is "A<blank>") don't show in the result list. This may be related to the feature of ignoring the leading "A ", but I still want to be able to find my songs there. It does work with song names with a leading "The ", though - these songs are found when searching for "T".

Another problem: Whenever the empeg stops playing (because, for example, it finished playing the results of my last search), the Search By ... menu just disappears. It really shouldn't, because I think this is quite a common operation - you search for a song name, listen to it, and shortly before it ends you start searching for the next thing you want to hear - only to have the menu disappear in the middle of your search...

If these problems are corrected, and the user interface becomes a little more consistent, then this feature will be really great!

Oh, and while I'm at it... I have a feature request for the empeg folks: Ignoring "The " is nice for english songs and artists. If you have the time and space, could you add the same for some major foreign languages? German, for example... smile. You could ignore "Der " and "Die " and "Das " at the beginning. Would make finding "Die Fantastischen Vier" easier, and also prove that the empeg team is truely thinking globally... :-)

Daniel