I figure there are zealots here who'll rip me to shreds.

I'm a zealot, but I'll do my best not to rip you to shreds. You have some valid complaints.

But to be fair, some of those complaints are obvious bugs which will be fixed very soon. That's the beauty of the Empeg- its software is upgradeable very easily. And the Empeg folks have been traditionally good about fixing bugs when they are reported. Some of the bugs you're reporting are new ones that have never been seen before, so give it a little time and you'll be pleased to see them fixed in pretty short order.

Some of your complaints are feature requests. Empeg is very good about adding requested features when they make sense and fit with their long-term goals of how the unit should evolve.

One of your complaints is a difference between the Empeg's intended design and the way you're using it. In this case, I can suggest an alternate way of doing it which will get the intended result.

Okay, let's start with the obvious bugs:

The Genre/database bug. Now, I sent an e-mail to the guys at Empeg and posted the bug here. I've not had a reply from Empeg (not even a confirmation of receipt).

It's surprising that they haven't gotten back to you on this one, but rest assured that if the mail got to them, they will address it. Even if the mail didn't reach them, you posted it here on Bug Reports, so they'll at least see it there.

Add to that the fact that even the simplest change (e.g. changing the name of a playlist) results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database' wait upon synchronisation. Sometimes you can add another couple of minutes while the unit downloads the database too. All this over ethernet.

This has got to be a bug. I've never seen a database rebuild take that long. Coupled with your report of the genre/database bug it makes me think that you might have gotten a corrupted database. This is usually a self-repairing phenomenon, and it's very rare, but you might have uncovered a previously-unknown bug which corrupts the database. If this is the case, rest assured that Empeg won't rest until it's fixed. Just look at how doggedly they pursued the "button stick" and "track hiccup" bugs until they were definitely fixed. Something like this would be a high-priority for them, too, because they wouldn't want any other customers to have the same problem.

Add to that the fact that deletion of some playlists actually deletes the tracks within the playlists and the deletion of others doesn't - it just moves them into 'Unattached items' (NB the songs only appeared in _one_ playlist). There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this.

Further confirmation of a possible database-corruption bug. It shouldn't behave this way at all. I've never heard of this happening to anyone else.

Add to that the fact that some updates in emplode don't register as needing to update the Empeg (sometimes I've found this with changing the playlist order and/or adding new tracks. Again, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to this).

Again, that's a bug. If you can give us a series of actions that will reproduce the problem, we'll all try it on our systems and verify if it's a universal bug. Or it could be related to the database bug, above.

It's a shame that even the potentially good (but rather unappealingly named) 'Toilet floor' is ruined by the occasional (once a second ish) black line/flicker across the screen.

This bug has never been reported. Report it officially. Now that Toby's coming on with Empeg as an employee, expect to see any bugs in the visuals worked out in short order.

If you think that one's named poorly, I wanted to name Snakes "Spürm". Dunno why no one went for that one... You can't blame "Toilet Floor" on me, But "Rorshach" and "BorgBeat" were my suggestions. Got a problem with those?

My preferred graphic - 'Infotex dist' has a bug which has been covered before.

Yeah, and I noticed it, too, recently. I thought it had long since been fixed. Make sure to re-report it officially so that Toby can have another look at it.

Now let's move on to the feature requests:

About half of the visuals are naff. About a quarter of the remainder are clever, but I'll never use them. It really should be possible to block out the ones you don't like.

You're not the only one to request this feature. I'm not sure if Empeg is planning on doing anything about it, though.

a) The lack of a subsearch facility (i.e. the ability to search within the result set of a previous search), and b) the lack of the ability to search on playlist.

These are good feature requests, and I agree that they would be very useful.

Now, on to the design of the playlists:

The Empeg forces its own structure on you. While under some circumstances this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make it very difficult to find songs.

I'm not sure how the Empeg forces anything upon you. The playlist tree is totally free-form and you can arrange it however you like. I believe your problem is that you're unhappy with the search features and you don't use the playlists very much. Perhaps you need to rethink your playlist structure a bit.

Agreed that the search functions are limited, but I think you're trying to use the search functions for purposes that it wasn't intended. For example, your specific complaint:

By way of example, I have five Pink Floyd albums. I can never remember what two of them are called (just checked and they're 'Relics' and 'The division bell'). At the moment, if I want to play them, I have to search on artist 'Pink Floyd' and play the whole of the result (all 87 or so tracks). I then put the display into Info:Track and then skip forward until I see the album name I want, then start a new search by source for that album. It should not be that hard.

It's not that hard. On my Empeg, I just go to playlists, press "7" on the remote to go to the "P"s, scroll to "Pink Floyd" (past Pat Metheny, Paula Cole, and Peter Gabriel) and select it, then scroll through the album titles until I find the one I want, then press Enter twice. A lot fewer keystrokes, and more intuitive. Is it just that you don't have any playlists arranged by artist/album?

One thing I noticed about your comments is interesting: Aside from acknowledged bugs, your complaints are all about features that don't exist in other car audio products (visuals and advanced playlist organization/searching). The Empeg is already better than any other car audio product in those areas. Just try doing an alphanumeric search from the driver's seat on any other product. Or try organizing playlists on a CD-ROM-based product.

My point is that on other car audio products, you don't even have those features, so there's nothing to complain about. Agreed that some of these features have room for improvement, and that's why Empeg listens to their customers. Keep your eyes on the software, it'll keep getting better.

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Tony Fabris