I have one of the Dell players. In general, I love it, but there are some specific issues or problems I have.

First, and foremost, the "simplified" hierarchy really limits what you can do with this thing. I have my entire CD collection stored on a hard drive. That's more than 400 discs. The single level of hierarchy keeps me from selecting an artist, then getting a list of albums by that artist, then selecting an album. As it stands now, I can only get all the tracks from that artist.

Second, the list of tracks is displayed alphabetically. This is entirely unacceptable for playing classical music. It ends up reordering the movements of a symphony. If I stuck with the shipped version of the PC side software, I would have to make playlists for ALL of my albums in order to play them in album order.

Third, there is a bug in the client software. Requests are sent to the server in a simplified HTTP protocol. This means things like spaces and commas are encoded as % 20 or % 2c (no spaces after the %, I just had to put them here to keep the BBS from whacking my text into commas and spaces). However, the client doesn't encode the % symbol itself, so the server sees the % and expects the next two bytes to be hex numbers. The upshot is that if a song, artist, or album has a % in it's name, it can't be played.

The PC side software doesn't find genres very well. All 4000 tracks of mine were reported as "other".

In order to deal with some of these issues, I've used a packet sniffer to watch the receiver talk to the PC software. I found that if I use the supplied software to boot the receiver, then shut off the PC software, I can run my own music server (which I've written). I've done this, so now I can see all my genres and also play songs with "%" in them. Also, I can server up songs from an album in track order. Along the way, I've found that sometimes the player will display lists exactly in the order the PC sends them (like a top level album or artist list), but not at other times (like the list of tracks by an artist or on an album, which the player alphabetizes).

However, the single level of hierarchy in the menus seems to be hardcoded. Hey, empeg guys, is there any way to feed this box responses in order to get it to do multiple levels of hierarchy? I REALLY REALLY don't want to have to write my own music player. The PC side was just some simple HTTP stuff, only took a few days, but replacing the player looks to be a significatly bigger task. Is there an SDK for this? Has anyone written a replacement player for either this box or the empeg car?

Another thing I want to do is add another top level choice. Right now, you can choose by Artist, Album, Genre, Title, or Playlist. I have a lot of classical music, tagged with Composer info. My working plan is to hijack the Genre category to serve up songs grouped by composer, but I'm dissapointed to lose the Genre list. Is there anyway to get the player to take this top level list from the PC server? I see from poking around the OS image on the PC server that it looks like that list is hardcoded (and, I've never seen the list go across with the packet sniffer), so I suspect that I would need to replace the player software in the receiver.

I want to love this machine. It's so close to what I want. I want to be able to put away my stack of CDs and just use this. But, the current player software just isn't as usefull as having access to all my physical CDs.

Does empeg intend to support this machine? Can I look for software updates for it here, sometime in the future? Any guess when? If you need a beta tester, I'm ready, willing, and (I think) qualified to give real feedback, both as a end user and a programmer.