Please don't take this whole thing personally Rob

Its OK, I didn't write the software

I do tend to take reviews and comments relating to the product or company quite personally, but that works to your advantage if I think you have a point. I think many of the developers are much the same, which could explain why I caught Roger sifting through Tony's empeg wishlist to decide what to fix next in emplode :)

I'm sorry, I can't see how that's relevant. I wasn't comparing the Empeg to any other MP3 players.

In a way you're right - it's not relevent because we don't look to other products to determine our own featurelist. I don't think we would even if there WERE any other comparable products. However life is full of comparisons, and what I essentially meant to say was "If you think the empeg restricts your freedom to organise music, you should try the other MP3 players". I think the empeg car player is very flexible indeed.

Maybe part of the problem is that recently the focus has been taken away from the playlist hierarchy itself. The orginal public Beta (Beta 5 I think) had ONLY playlists - no searching at all. If you organised your music in a sensible way this wasn't too terrible a restriction.

Now, the more common way to use the player seems to be to dump all tracks into vaguely arbitrary places, and rely on searching to find what you want. I think this does reflect the direction that the developers are taking the product, but the searching isn't quite good enough to fully support that methodology - yet.

Release 1.1 will include some very whizzy things for the dynamic selection of music, and at that point I could envisage running without any rigid playlist structure.

"Why can I set the tags, but then not use them to search on"

That's a good question. I've never quite understood why emplode brings up a full tags dialog for playlists, although I vaguely recall Mike (the original author of emplode) having a reason for it at the time. I'll have a chat with the developers to see if we can get the dialog trimmed down to contain only stuff that works.

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.

We do have a policy of not publishing our internal wishlists and future build details. This frustrates some people, but we have good reasons, number one being that we have a very dynamic workload. If an OEM project pops up and pushes a car player feature back by three months, no tears will be spilled if that feature hasn't been promised outside of empeg. Likewise, publishing a wishlist and then not acting upon it in short order can cause great resentment from some parties.

We prefer for new features to be a nice surprise (which also keeps potential competitors guessing), unless it's an urgent or complex issue which warrants discussion in advance.

There is a risk that we could work on avenues that are divergent with the general wishes of our customerbase. An example was the "feature" to disable visuals in-car by default. We didn't anticipate the strength of feeling on that issue, and had to hurriedly implement a compromise (held bottom button). Had that compromise been in place from the start I don't think a significant degree of opposition would have arisen.

This is one of the reasons that we are now forming a client Alpha Test team. About half a dozen clients (selected by us - nobody need self nominate!) will get access to Alpha releases a few days ahead of the public Beta. We will also discuss future plans with them, in a confidential forum. This will give us an opportunity to guage opinion without creating major public uproar, and you'll also get better quality Beta releases (no more rev. A, B, C, D etc etc - hopefully!).

If it appears to the user that the bugs reporting mailbox is a black hole

I wasn't aware, before now, that there was any kind of a problem with the bug reporting system. If there is a problem it is probably because each report is cc'd to a number of developers, and it's up to them to adopt appropriate issues. On Monday I'll look into a way of ensuring that no issue is overlooked or processed without a response.

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

Indeed - although I would point out it works fine for me, and I've never heard of this issue before. Assuming you don't have a bunch of tracks with bad tags (e.g. V1/V2 contention issues, as discussed elsewhere) it's a good find, and an essential fix for the next Beta.

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

Definitely - and very much by design! We have seriously over-engineered the potential capabilities of the product to future-proof it as much as possible. Even in a year from now I doubt the software will take advantage of everything the product is capable of. In my book, that's something that significantly adds to the value of the product.

You've probably noticed that there is currently no directly comparable OEM version of the car player. OEM's have looked at it, and decided what needs to be removed ("because it's not even used by the software!"), and the result is a very cut down product. That's why we'll continue to make the car player ourselves for as long as there's a demand - we want to maintain a continuously evolving, living project. If the software was actually ever *finished* I don't know what we'd do!

Of course that's not the sort of thing you can say on a corporate web site, but I would hope that most people here will get my point.

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

Maybe, but that is pretty much our job. You reported a bug with genre searches in a clear and concise way, and now it's up to us to track down what the problem is. If we can't reproduce it here, then we do have the capability to produce debug logs from your system (with your co-operation, of course).

2 - To make it easier to track down in which physical playlist on the Empeg a file exists

The new search feature will accommodate that.

let's say that I've been listening to my Empeg and realised that the MP3 sounded dodgy

We have a much cleaner solution to cope with this (and similar) problems, which I believe is going to be in 1.1.

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

I would have to say that my experience is that this is very much the norm for the IT industry. I've lost count of the MAJOR companies we've had to contact with bug reports (some quite serious) without ever getting a reply.

HOWEVER I would go on to say that this is NOT the empeg approach. You have identified a weakness in a customer facing part of the company and I'll get that fixed (even if it is an auto-responder, in the first instance).

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

It's actually supposed to be a dance floor (with flashing lights etc) but perhaps Toby's experience of clubbing has involved a lot of time spent horizontal in the bathroom

Keep the feedback coming!

Rob