As many of you probably know, an indifference point is the price at which you become ambivilanet about buying a product. Much higher and purchasing it would be out of the question, much lower and you would feel very good about buying it. If you are really not interested, your indifference point may fall toward 0.

Sonicblue has tended to go after the high end of the market and many of the members here are their target audience. I just wanted to do a little market research out of curiousity.

Product - indifference point (current price/bought?)

Empeg 20 gB- $500 ($700 / YES at $300)
ReplayTV 40 gB- $500 ($450 incl. activation / YES at $450)
Rio Central 20 gB - $400 ($1000 / NO)
Sirius Sat Radio - $150 + $6/month ($300 inst. + $13/month / NO)
Ipod 10 gB - $200 ($400 / NO)
Ipod 20 gB - $300 ($500 / NO)

Anybody else care to contribute?

-Biscuits

I bought the empeg for 650 from another bbs user.

I bought the Riot for 400
(choose over ipod due to clueless apple store people and hdd size)

I would but the central right now if it would sync with my empeg either directly or through my computer.

I recently got the tivo2 for 350 so I can't see getting a replay.

I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to make the two synch up if you knew how to program and could control the central through a computer (add/remove songs, change ID tags)... It would be an interesting project.

Well I don't know how to program. The central does work with emplode.

If it uses emplode, it would certainly be possible to program something like that. I only have rudimentary programming skills, but I imagine I could do this in a week. It would be crude and slow, but it would work ok.

If you really want to, you could teach yourself some basic programming or find someone else who knows how that is willing to do it.

I programmed something like this at my last job using a program called macro express. It is really easy to learn, although it is impossible to document your work and very clunky.

-Biscuits

I don't think they make the source for emplode avaliable or are you thinking a seprate program that would be used with emplode.

I was hoping mike could add something like this to jemplode. I wonder if he takes bribes ?

Adding the features to Jemplode is a better solution, but it would be possible to write another program to interface with emplode if you had to (moving mouse, typing in text, etc.) There are any number of ways you can do it.

As I said though, I personally am not a very skilled programmer and currently have no need for such a program.

Are you actually offering to pay somebody on these forums to write you such a utility?

-Biscuits

Well I would really like it if mike could add this feature to jemplode I know he doesn't have a central which leaves little incentive to bother. So I wonder if he can be bought

I would buy the central right now if it would sync with my empeg either directly or through my computer.

It can, with very little effort. See this post for the idea.

Here's the problems I would have with that method.

I don't think I could figure out how to do it.

I want to be able to sync the two devices like a palm so I can just rip all the cd's on the central and hit sync and it puts all the same stuff on the empeg and I don't have to try to remember what I added since I did it last.

This actually would be kind of a fun project. I'm not sure exactly how you'd do the interfacing. You could use something like macro express (or python) to use your mouse/keyboard for you to cut/paste, etc., but I'm sure that is not the best way to go. As of right now, it is all I know how to do, but, of course, it would be modular, so that could be changed later.

Once you pulled off all of the relevant information, the data could be entered into a database. And then compared the data from the second device to the database.

It wouldn't be too elegant, and it might be kind of slow (30 minutes or so to run), but it would get the job done. Both devices would be perfectly synched.

I imagine it would need to be faster than that to really make sense though. Emptool would already work OK, but something like this could also serve to keep your PC and Empeg in perfect synch, or possibly even multiple computers, by swapping out components.

-Biscuits