Now's the time to reveal, am I the only person on this forum that had to go out and buy a computer to work my Empeg?

Probably !

Surely Dabbar is the only one that converts to MP3? Although that's not an advantage for Empeg it's very handy to put CD-R's on my portable.

Many things that playback MP3 can also play back MP2 (although you might have to change the file extension to lie to it) even if they don't advertise the fact. But you are right, if you need MP3 output then DabBar is useful (although there are plenty of other ways of converting MP2 to MP3)