Oh, where to begin, where to begin? I ordered my EMPEG one week ago, late Saturday night. On Wednesday, it arrived. I spent Wednesday night discovering that (a) my Linux box's serial ports don't work and (b) there's an obscure bug in the DHCP support of the EMPEG when used with a Linksys DSL Router. An e-mail exchange with Mike Crowe ultimately led me to hook up a Windows-running laptop, with a working serial port, and to assign a static IP address until the next software rev from EMPEG comes out to fix the DHCP bug. Fair enough. Thursday night I told emptool "here's a directory with 10GB of MP3's, please download them". I went to bed. Friday morning, there it all was. I hooked the EMPEG to my home stereo and it worked like a champ. Today, I had some non-techie friends over for breakfast and was using the EMPEG as a jukebox. One guy, a professional DJ, was deeply impressed. Three women concluded I had far too many toys.

On Monday, I have an appointment with a local stereo installer. This is apparently going to be quite tricky because BMW designs its stereos to maximally complicate installation. Not only are none of the connectors compatible with anything, but the voltage levels BMW uses are non-standard. My installer tells me he ordered the appropriate adapters and may have to put in a small amplifier between the EMPEG and my built-in amplifier. I'll post more on this later. At any rate, the red color looks like it will match the BMW just fine. It also looks quite nice against my Yamaha home stereo, which uses orange and red in its displays.

Meanwhile, I definitely enjoy my new toy. Comments in no particular order:

- I find myself using the normal "Info" screens, not the visuals. I've got enough stuff in there that it's really nice to see who is singing what. I strangely find myself liking the Analog VU Meter visual. It's the simplest one there, but it has that sort of retro look to it.

- The power-off LED is amazingly bright. Is there some way to disable it? I don't want it drawing particular attention from some car stereo thief.

- This has been discussed elsewhere, but the EMPEG needs to have GUI stuff to let you see and manipulate its network settings. These would go in the "Info" menu and would work similarly to how you set the date and time.

- The advanced search and the visual selectors have this one-way business where you keep hitting the single button and the EMPEG goes to the next dialog or visual. If you shoot past what you want, you have to loop all the way around. It would be nice to use the left/right buttons so you can go back and forth.

- EMPEG desperately needs a custom remote control with buttons having different shapes and sizes. "Direct OK", "DNPP" and "CD-MD-CH" (used to select advanced search, visual, and info display, respectively) are all adjacent and I find myself regularly hitting the wrong button. Even having legends saying "Visuals" and "Disp. Info" on the current remote would be an improvement.

- The EMPEG display's fonts are quite readable, even from across the room. However, characters with accents (e.g., "Rubén González") come out looking just awful, cutting off the bottom half the accented character.

- The "Info: Now & Next" is quite useful, but it would be even better if it showed the previous track, then the current one, and a couple subsequent tracks. This way, if you miss a track's the title, and your EMPEG has gone on to the next track, you need not disturb listeners by hitting the "previous track" button.

- emptool happily imported files that weren't MP3s. I had a bunch of junk in my mp3 directory (HTML files, m3u's, etc.) that were happily uploaded, appear in playlists, but don't do anything. emptool should probably check if the file is something bogus and not bother copying it over.

- emptool really needs word completion, as done in every major Unix shell.

- I could never get emptool's 'move' command to do anything useful. Is it meant to work like the Unix 'mv' command? I ended up flipping back and forth between emptool on Linux and emplode on Windows for stuff. emptool was useful for bulk operations ('rm *.m3u' to clean up the above mess) and emplode was useful for managing playlists.

- emptool should support m3u files, turning them into EMPEG playlists.

- emptool should use ID3v1.1 track IDs to determine the order of tracks. I have one directory per album and all the tracks have track numbers. It would be nice if the ordering were preserved. As it is currently, I've had to manually reorder tracks for a couple albums where it really matters.

- Distant wish list item: it would be cool to have some way of giving feedback to the EMPEG on what tracks you like and what tracks you don't. Then, in addition to randomly re-ordering tracks, you could have a random ordering biased toward having favorite tracks earlier.

- Another distant wish list item: it would be cool to add a track to any playlist on the fly, from the GUI. "This cut of 'Take The A Train' is pretty good. It should be on my set list for when I next DJ our local swing night." Or, conversely, "everybody hated the last track I played; delete it from my set list for future reference."

- This was mentioned earlier, but to use the EMPEG as a semi-autonomous DJ device, I'd need to be able to say "here's a playlist, go" and be able to field specific requests ("Hey Dan, can you play Slim Gaillard's `Tip Light' next?"). As far as I can tell, new tracks can only be added to the end of a playlist, and editing the playlist causes the player to momentarily pause playback. I guess I want the pauses fixed, and I want the advanced search to have a new mode that appends after the current song, not just the end of the playlist.

Coming in future installments of my review (hey kids, don't touch that dial!):

- Installing the thing in my car. Learning precisely how much bending over backward will have been required to satisfy the evil stereo designers at BMW.

- Picking a couple songs I know well, encoding each one ten different ways with lame, and doing a double-blind listening test to see what bitrate is sufficient to make me a happy camper.


Wheee!

Dan (Ser# 08000131, Queue# 13700, 12GB Red)