Well, heck, things have been kinda quiet around here recently, so let's "kick it up a notch!"

(please read the text below thoroughly before paging down to the links... you were warned.)


Announcing emphatic v2.00

emphatic is a frontend application for the empeg car player. Its first purpose in life was to scroll lyrics across the empeg screen synchronized with your music. Since then, it's grown into what I consider a fully functional replacement user interface for the player application.

It's been about a year and a half since the last emphatic release, so there are a LOT of changes. I can't possibly cover them all, but here are just a few of the things you can do with emphatic:

• control the way your track information is displayed on the empeg display with custom display modes
• display ID3v2 fields not normally available in player info modes
• select a specific visual to be shown for each custom display mode
• display song lyrics synchronized with the music, and scrolled in horizontal or vertical fashion
• customize your player's menu system, putting menu options where you want them
• assign ratings to your music and use the song rating data in weighted shuffle modes
• perform searches of your music library without the use of a remote control
  

The requirements for running emphatic are

• player software v2 or v3
• Hijack v400+
  

emphatic comes with Windows and Unix installation scripts, which should help you get things configured. The configuration steps are documented on the emphatic web page, so take a look there before you start so that you understand what you're doing when you go to install. The program ships with a sample configuration XML file which should work for most people, however, a couple of the display modes in the sample XML make use of player fonts that don't ship with all versions of the player. As I have not yet received permission to redistribute empeg player fonts, you'll have to get these on your own if you want to use them, at least for now.

I think you'll find emphatic v2.00 is a very large step forward in terms of new functionality, but along with new functionality comes new bugs. While it's gone through a few cycles of alpha testing, I can assure you there are still bugs. I don't personally like calling general public releases "beta," but I would say v2.00 "final" is "beta quality" software, so please be patient if you find there are bugs. Take a look at the "known issues" section of the web page for more info on what's known to be "not quite right."

And, of course, because emphatic's job in life is to give you access to things you were never able to do, sometimes, that means doing things the empeg lads didn't think we'd be doing. emphatic reads a lot of internal player data, and it even writes to the player's dynamic data partition. So keep this in mind as you play with it, and understand that, although I and my alpha testers have done what we can to ferret out bugs, there might be some left, and there is a remote possibility these bugs would cause data loss on your empeg.

Whew, enough disclaiming... On to the next big announcement...


Announcing lrcDB

So, now that you've got this great little application capable of displaying synchronized song lyrics, where are you going to get the lyrics? That's where lrcDB comes in. lrcDB is a website that I've developed as a central repository for sharing time-tagged lyrics, sometimes referred to as LRC files. The site is still very much under development, and I've still got some bugs to squash, but it's at a point now where I feel comfortable opening it to the members of this BBS.

Lyrics can be uploaded and downloaded via the lrcDB website, or via a soon-to-be-released version of the SYLT Lyrics Plugin for Winamp written by the empeg BBS' own elperepat.

Sharing lyrics requires registering on the lrcDB site, but you won't be asked for any more information than you were when you registered on this BBS. Please use your empeg BBS username at lrcDB so we know who you are!


And, oh yeah, on a personal note...

As mentioned in the subject line, this is my 5,000th post to the BBS. It really does seem like it was yesterday that I was browsing Hugo's mp3mobile webpage, lusting after the prospect of having my mp3 collection travel with me in the car, and being able to read track information on that cutting-edge text-only screen!

Nearly five years later, I seem to have found a bit of an online home on this BBS, and not just because I love my car stereo. This BBS is, and has always been, a wonderful place to pass the time talking about anything and everything. My volume of posts is a sign that I either have a serious mental problem, or this BBS is something very special. Or both, but let's not get into that now.

So, with the rest of this 5,000th post, I just want to thank everyone I've had the chance to interact with on these forums. I haven't yet had the chance to meet any of you in person, but some day I'll find a meet that doesn't conflict with a vacation or a family wedding. I've had a great time throughout my first 5,000 posts here, and I'm really looking forward to the next 5,000. Thanks, everybody.

Oh, yeah, you probably want those links to emphatic and lrcDB!