Rob> Hey ho, guess I'd better respond..

Thanks.

Please don't take this whole thing personally Rob, I tried to put myself in the shoes of somebody who isn't a member of this BB and doesn't know what has been going on in the past. I hope that you'll get more and more of these customers (meaning that I hope you sell lots more Empegs), so these are the kind of queries I suspect you'll be getting.

Me> About half of the visuals are naff.

Rob> We've already stated that visuals will become plug-ins in a future release,

I'm afraid I missed that announcement. I also couldn't find any reference to that on your web site. I apologise for jumping in feet first, but my comment still stands.

Rob> I have to say, you're the first person I've heard slag off the visuals

I'm not slagging them off. I am well aware that personal tastes differ. I am merely commenting as part of my review that I don't like half of them. Perhaps I should have said "uninteresting" or "poor" instead of "naff".

Rob> I was about to say second, but I think the other person was actually you in another thread.

Nope. This is my first comment on the subject.

Of course, the implication of my thinking that half the visuals are poor/naff is that I think that the other half are pretty damn good. The point of my comment was that I wanted a way to block out the ones I don't like.

Rob> I don't see how anyone who has sat and watched Funnel Web for half an hour could find anything negative to say, but I guess it's horses for courses.

Erm. I never said anything about not liking 'Funnel Web'. As it happens, that one would be listed in my top 3.

Me> The Empeg forces its own structure on you

Rob> *cough* *splutter* You are kidding, right? Have you USED any other MP3 players??

No. But I'm sorry, I can't see how that's relevant. I wasn't comparing the Empeg to any other MP3 players.

Rob> I agree that search for playlist would be handy, and should be fairly trivial. I thought it already did this in a way if you set the tags for the playlist, but maybe I imagined it.

My immediate thought when I found I couldn't search by playlist was that since Emplode allowed me to set tags for the playlist itself I could use those. My frustration is this great purely because that didn't work either - "Why can I set the tags, but then not use them to search on" I thought, and more annoyed I became.

Rob> Although you have shot down the UI you haven't made any suggestions for how it could be improved.

Erm...

Have a look here and here.

The reason I didn't include any of these and simply alluded to others was because this piece was meant as a review at 5 days and nothing more.

The other reason you haven't got my big long list is because I have other things to do with the small amount of spare time I've got at the moment.

But... You will get it.

Rob> I think most long standing contributors here will realise that specific well argued suggestions get one of three responses from us - "Yes, we'll do it", "We'd like to do it, but there are reasons why we can't" or "Sorry, you're mad". There have been a lot of suggestions that got response (a).

I apologise for not being a long standing contributor, but as I've only had the unit for 5 days, that's not really been possible. However, I have been reading every post on this board since before I registered here in March. As a long term reader of this BB, I would say that there are also a lot of suggestions which have not been responded to at all.

Me> The Genre/database bug.

Rob> It's a bug.

Thankyou.

Rob> As a new owner I guess you don't realise yet that we put out software releases on a very regular basis, and stuff like this gets fixed quickly.

As a long term reader of this BB, of course I realise this. However, this is not my gripe. How am I to know if:

a) It is a bug, and
b) I'm not doing something stupid

unless somebody responds to the mail and says so.

If it appears to the user that the bugs reporting mailbox is a black hole, then that user is hardly likely to post any more bugs.

Even an automated response saying "Thanks for your report. We will look into it ASAP and we'll be in touch if we need more information from you." would be nice.

Rob> ... Despite the downside, I think the advantage of keeping bugs in the domain of the developers are considerable and issues get dealt with more quickly than if they entered the support database. ...

Absolutely, but unless there's some sort of feedback (even if, as a last resort, it's automated), then I for one am much more unlikely to report more bugs in the future.

Rob> Don't bother sending this bug to support, though. We know about it.

This is going to sound sarcastic whichever way I phrase it, but it's a genuine question:

Apart from you having just said that, how else would I know that this is a genuine bug and is already being dealt with?

Me> To be honest, after demoing it to people, I've had a hard time justifying to them why I've spent so much money.

Rob> Don't ever go for a job in press relations

My comment was not about my skills as a salesman, but purely about how the Empeg sold itself. It was perhaps unfortunate that two people I let loose with it tried to do things which didn't work, but C'est la vie. From when I first saw the Empeg (on /. I think) over a year ago I was sold on it. Maybe if I worked in a room full of techies then there wouldn't have been a problem. As it is I'm a systems manager in the midst of a load of testers and pen pushers.

Rob> Are you really that unimpressed?

With the Empeg? No. I'm not. I was saying that other people were.

With Emplode, yes. I had hoped it would be more slick than it is.

Rob> If you do "get it" and you think it sucks, I can live with that

No. The point is that _I_ do get it. That's the whole reason I joined the queue over a year ago. As I tried to say in my first post, the hardware looks excellent and I'll give a sound-in-the-car review next week (from a very very man-in-the-street-not-at-all-an-audiophile POV).

My disappointment (and it is just that) is that the UI on Emplode (and, to a lesser extent, on the Empeg) either don't exploit the full potential of the hardware in some respects and makes it difficult to realise the full potential of the hardware in others.

Of course, since I've been reading posts here for many months, it's possible that my expectations could have been raised too high.

Me> The Genre bug and lack of sub-search both made people say words to the effect of "Why did you spend so much money on a badly made piece of junk like that"

Rob> Whatever you do, never ever show them a PJB, or an Aiwa MP3 head, or practically any other MP3 player on the market. They'll probably burst a blood vessel.

My point is that the Empeg advertises a Genre search and it should work. In my experience, it doesn't.

I don't know the PJB or Aiwa unit you're talking about (not had a chance to play with a PJB yet, although I am considering one as a travel to work walkman), but I'd put money on the fact that if either of these offered a search by genre function, that function would work.

Me> It's non-intuitative

Rob> You have a point in so much as it works just like Windows Explorer.

It does not work just like WE. If it did, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. There are several differences (e.g. the way drag-and-drop works).

Rob> It's interesting that a number of major MP3 manufacturers have commented that our way of doing things walks all over their brushed-chrome-effect applications, though.

Indeed. I am not surprised. The Empeg is a vastly superior product to all the MP3 products I'm aware of (although there's this Rio home player networkable thing which looks kinda cool ).

Me> for starters, it should be able to emulate the Empeg's creation of virtual playlists

Rob> Why??

1 - It would help in tracking down errors/bugs - the only way I could find about why the player was restarting when I tried to play certain genres was to dump the CSV and do some analysis on that. If Emplode offered a view of virtual playlists, I could have gone into the Genre section, had a looksee and maybe not had to have done the digging with the CSV.

2 - To make it easier to track down in which physical playlist on the Empeg a file exists. Hmmm. Difficult to explain, but let's say that I've been listening to my Empeg and realised that the MP3 sounded dodgy. As it stands, unless I can remember which playlist(s) I put that MP3 into, I can't track it down on Emplode. If I was able to look at the virtual artists playlists, I could see it there and not have to search through each playlist manually.

Rob> I believe Roger is working on something to search for tracks from emplode by tag, but other than that I don't understand what you're getting at.

That would be one solution - at least point 2 could be dealt with that way. A simple search was something I considered, but I believe that showing these virtual playlists (and yes, perhaps coupled with a simple search) is a more complete solution.

Me> results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database'

Rob> It's a bug - it didn't do that a month ago, and all being well it won't do it on the next release.

I mentioned this in the Wish List section, Tony's reply seemed to indicate that this was normal. On re-reading that, I should have stated exactly how long this was taking. Sorry.

Rob> You then go on to mention a number of other bugs (some of which I've never even heard of, have you reported them?) to which my above response applies.

Some of them I'm not even sure are bugs which is why I raised a number of them under the Wish List section.




And Then Tony replied:

Tony> But to be fair, some of those complaints are obvious bugs which will be fixed very soon.

Yes, but the people I was demoing to are used to the Microsoft definition of 'fixed very soon'. Needless to say, this didn't wash with them!

Tony> Even if the mail didn't reach them, you posted it here on Bug Reports, so they'll at least see it there.

I don't mind spending my time writing bug reports for Empeg. I don't mind it even though I paid $1700 for the unit. What I do mind is not getting any feedback (even if it's to say "You stupid idiot" ).

Me> Add to that the fact that some updates in emplode don't register as needing to update the Empeg

Tony> 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.

Strange one that. I've tried to reproduce it again and it worked normally. By the time I got it to repeat the error, I'd forgotten what I'd done. I'll have another play with this tomorrow.

Tony> ... But "Rorshach" and "BorgBeat" were my suggestions. Got a problem with those?

Nope. (BTW, how's about Kitchen Floor instead of toilet floor?)

Me> The Empeg forces its own structure on you.

Tony> I'm not sure how the Empeg forces anything upon you. ... Perhaps you need to rethink your playlist structure a bit.

Heh. It doesn't force anything on me, but I need to rethink my playlist structure a bit. I think you just proved my point

I hear what you say though.

Tony> It's not that hard. ... A lot fewer keystrokes, and more intuitive. Is it just that you don't have any playlists arranged by artist/album?

I guess they will have to be in future. To do it properly, that means reorganising my entire MP3 collection. Erk.

Tony> 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.

You are, of course, absolutely correct. I'm glad I bought the Empeg, even though other people I work with think I'm an idiot for spending that much money.

I apologise to everybody at Empeg who has taken my comments as being anti-them or anti-Empeg.


Nick (who's going for the most number of words in any one posting to the BB).


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