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I'm curious to know how the development team from empeg relates to the current group


Empeg developers = Karma developers. Well, except for a notable turnover or two. Basically everyone you see on Riovolution also worked on the Empeg.

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What have I missed by never scraping together the cash for a car unit?


This community and a kick ass car mp3 player.

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Argh. Dang it, I was hoping that this fell into the "undocumented feature" category. "


I'm guessing by the end of your post you realized that this is fixed and is now an undocumented feature But then just about everything in jEmplode is undocumented

A Soup Playlist is the term for a playlist that is a dynamic view onto the big blob (or soup) tunes on your device. It is pretty much equivalent to Smart Playlists, but at least with jEmplode, you can do some cooler stuff

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I'm curious as to what functionality is carried over to the Karma, and what functionality was there for the empeg in the first place


jEmplode has been around for a couple years and it was the basis of Rio Music Manager Lite. The core backend is shared between the two (that is, the way that the tunes, playlists, searching, soups, etc is represented bahind the scenes is the same). RMML has a more user-friendly UI (and less powerful). RMML added background syncing (with the sync queue -- that third tab in jEmplode -- that's an upstream feature from RMML), internationalization support (though it's not fully integrated into jEmplode yet, it's in the wings), a lot more testing, performance improvements, and better support on the Mac. I'm sure there are some other things as well that I can't think of, but those are the main ones I think. As far as what RMML /doesn't/ have, it doesn't have explicit support for nested playlists, it doesn't have the advanced search, doesn't have advanced properties, logo editor, animation editor (which can't be used on karma anyway, though), and a bunch of other random things that show up in a program that's been developed for years.

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Is there documentation beyond the faq?


Sorry ... The best docs are searching for topics on the forum. There's never been a jEmplode documentation project, and it would bore me to death, so there probably never will be.

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jEmplode seems to have a very different structure from RMM. (I haven't tried RMML - should I?)


I don't know that you should necessarily use RMML if you're happy with RMM, though in some ways it is more similar to jEmplode.

The primary difference is that jEmplode/RMML don't maintain a local database of music. It's entire reason for being is managing the music on your player, not on your hard drive. So it's not like you see all your music and then sync them to the player like RMM. Instead, you drag the music you want on your device from your file browser and drop them onto jEmplode. It does things like duplicate checking, etc, but it's fairly limited in its ability to truly synchronize music (since it has no local datastore to sync /against/).

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Can I specify via a soup what stays on my Karma?


Not really .. Soups aren't sync profiles, rather they are dynamic playlists. So a soup will show you a filtered view of whatever music you have on your device, but they aren't currently used to control /what/ music goes onto the device. So if you have a "artist = James Taylor" search soup, all of your James Taylor songs that you put on your device will appear in that soup. Note that soups are entirely done on the client, not on the Karma. So if you stop using jEmplode, they will no longer update ... It's just some magic that is done when you add tunes through jEmplode.

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Is there a rating tag already? Does editing the advanced properties of a song


There is not a rating tag currently, though I've had plans to add one on the Empeg for my own evil purposes for a while now. /Normally/ you would be able to just use advanced properties to add a rating tag yourself, but unfortunately the same bug that caused me to have to do that workaround for soups affects your proposed rating tag. Basically any tag that is outside of what the Karma "knows" about will be saved on the device, but won't be read back off. So it will appear to disappear. When the bug is fixed that data will start coming back off, though, but it's obviously a low priority fix (it only affects people doing things that are unsanctioned by Rio). I could technically extend my soup fix to support arbitrary additional tags, though without too much pain. I may do that, actually. Same deal though, it would only work in jEmplode, not in RMM (though it would in RMML since they share the same codebase).

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In iTunes I had a playlist of my top rated songs which I hadn't listened to in two weeks, which is really nice for unattended listening.


I agree ... I'd love to do this on the Karma and Empeg someday.

ms