The power-off LED is amazingly bright. Is there some way to disable it?

Hugo's made some noises about wanting to make that configurable. I'm all for it, too.

EMPEG desperately needs a custom remote control with buttons having different shapes and sizes.

There have been some noises about this, too. They've wanted to do their own remote for a long time, but haven't been able to get it into production quite yet. In the meantime, you get used to the Kenwood remote pretty fast- give it a few days.

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.

I'd love to be able to edit the fonts, personally. Hugo once said that he might release a tool which lets you convert images into fonts. That would be so fun. Then you could see if you could do a better job on those characters with a limited number of pixels...

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.

I'm going to fight you on this one. I would prefer either a) having five lines of future song titles back (we lost one somewhere during the beta 11 series), or b) have four lines plus a line that scrolls detail data on the current song.

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.

Emplode doesn't do that any more. Emptool has been open-sourced, so go write your own file filter.

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

I'd like to see this for Emplode...

emptool should use ID3v1.1 track IDs to determine the order of tracks.

This would be nice for Emplode as well (as discussed elsewhere, along with filename sorting if track numbers are included in the file name).

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.

Everyone talks about this "voting" thing, and I just don't see how that would be a good thing for me. If the song sucks, I don't put it into the player. If the song is marginal, it goes in for the purpose of variety. If I voted on every song, then I'd only end up listening to about 1/8 of my collection because it'd never play any of my non-favorite songs. Part of what makes the Empeg cool is that it brings your collection back to life, and lets you hear songs that you might not have gone out of your way to listen to. I've gotten a new appreciation for certain albums because of this.

Another distant wish list item: it would be cool to add a track to any playlist on the fly, from the GUI.

With the limited display and UI, I don't see this being an easy process that you'd want to do while in the car. The whole idea of Emplode is so that you can do all your playlist editing while sitting safely behind the wheel of a desk.

With that said, a work-around that you'll see in 1.1 is the ability to "tag" a given track for future attention. You could mark that track while driving, then when you get home it'll be flagged and you can say "oh yeah, I wanted to put that song on that party mix playlist" and do it... safely.

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.

I'm with you on that one. Right now we have two modes: "Search by" and "Append by", what we need is a third "Insert by" mode. This has been requested elsewhere.

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.

Something I've noticed in my experience: Your favorite, most well-known songs are not necessarily the best ones to use for this test. Your favorite song might not exhibit certain artifacts, whereas a less-loved tune might artifact all over the place at the same bitrate. Plus, you'll find out that whatever bit rate you're happy with at first, your ears will get better and you'll start to notice artifacts more and more as time goes on. For a while I was fine with 128 or the middle VBR bitrate in AC. Then I started hearing artifacts after I got used to the sound of the system in the car, and now I'm backfilling at higher bitrates.

Oh, and ten is WAY too many to do a comparison, you'll get very fatigued. Three is the maximum you'd want to do.

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Tony Fabris