I was interested in seeing was a way to append the current dynamic playlist by browsing for songs to add.

That's a good question. There's really two modes of selecting tunes in the Empeg:

The first is by navigating the playlist tree. That's the part that's most closely analagous to browsing. In that mode, you start at the top of the tree and can navigate through all the subtrees, all the way down to an individual song buried deep in a subtree if you want. At any point during this "browse", you can choose to hit the "play" icon or to keep browsing. So you can hit play at any branch of the tree and it'll play that branch and all of its sub-branches. Or you can drill down to an individual song, hit play, and it'll play just that song.

But at the current time, when you are browsing the playlist tree, it doesn't offer the option to append. The append option is only available in...

... The second mode, searches. From this mode, you can search the tag data. The searches are by song title, artist name, album name, or genre. You enter the letters to search for using the number keys on the remote. The list starts with "everything", then gets shorter as you enter letters from the remote. The results of your search are very linear, and aren't anything at all like the multilevel playlist tree. They are displayed in a single alphabetical list. Now you can browse this list, but only in a linear fashion, scrolling up and down amongst your current search results. At this point, a single button toggles between appending to or replacing your current playlist. And you still have the option to scroll through these search results or to further narrow your search by typing more letters. Once you've settled on a single search result, you hit a button to confirm it. (This single result could be a single song, an entire album, an entire genre, or an entire artist's catalog, depending on what you chose to search for.)

after searching for song/album/artist/genre, do you get a choice of whether or not you want to add the song(s)?

Right. You can cancel out of the search at any time, or you can narrow the search further, or you can toggle between append/replace at any time. And nothing changes until you hit that final button to confirm- the current playlist keeps playing this whole time.

I'm just saying it would be nice to look through my collection instead of searching for songs

That's more like the first option, browsing the playlist tree. The only drawback is that you can't "append" from that mode, you can only append from searches. This sounds like a limitation, but it's really not. Again, once you actully get an Empeg and try it out, you find that it's easy to hear the music you want to hear. Don't worry about it.

But this gives me an idea. It would seem to me that with the new playlist code in place, it'd be possible to add the append feature to the playlist browser. Using the same button that toggles append mode in the search window, you could toggle append mode while browsing the playlist tree. Hmm...

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Tony Fabris