Anyhow, I made folders for each group, then made subfolders for each album and placed the songs in there.

That's a great way to do it. A single drag-and-drop will then create your entire playlist structure in emplode, and you'll have a nice neat set of artist/album playlists.


Speaking of which, empeg searches by artist and title currently, correct? It doesn't do anything with the others just yet, right?

Currently, you can search on Artist, Title, Album, Year, and Genre. Right from the remote control. It's neat when you see it in action- the fuzzy-search has a great UI.


I believe the last thing I read was that it broke the limitation of the album and artist name, but that was all. Still the case?

I think what you mean is: The ID3 tag specification limits the fields to 30 characters in your MP3 files on your PC. (The ID3v2 spec is different, but that's a different subject that I won't get into right now.)

The Empeg uses your ID3 tags as its starting point. But it doesn't store its data in the ID3 tags. It stores the data in its database, which has no such limitation. So after the songs are in your empeg, you can name the artists and titles as long as you want.

In fact, the 30-character limit for ID3 tags exists in four places: Artist, Title, Album, and Comment. The Empeg's database has no limits on the length of any of these fields.

Is that what you mean?

One thing you might want to consider: Even though you can name the songs any length in emplode, the empeg's VFD display is limited in the number of characters you can see at one time. So even though I have to abbreviate some of my song/artist/album titles for the PC, I leave them that way after I move them to the empeg since I usually wouldn't see the extra letters anyway.

Along the same lines, what types of playlists do people have?

Since the playlists are totally free-form, and very easy to create/change, everyone will have different ways of putting together their playlists.

I started with a buch of artist/album playlists. Then I added a few "mood" playlists such as "Low key" and "Tony's Favorites", then added a "Test audio" and a "Demo" playlist. I have two special-purpose playlists as well: "LAN Party", which is mostly industrial and techno to keep my fellow gamers happy, and "Filks" in which I store songs that I'm working on Filk parodies for.

Some people arrange their playlists by genre. Others have more esoteric playlists, such as Chip who has an "80's stuff" playlist that you can see in his empeg demonstration video. Hugo has a playlst called "Teen" which is populated with N'sync, Britney Spears, and all that other stuff that'll rot your brain.

I still think it'd be cool to create a "both extremes" playlist that combines opposite ends of the spectrum, like Nine Inch Nails and Yanni, or Megadeath and James Taylor. That'd be interesting to shuffle-play.

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Tony Fabris