Here's an email I sent him on 5-Nov-2000. I see no problem with posting it - it's MY words, I haven't quoted anything he wrote.

Trae,

Taking your points in turn:

Your player absolutely should not have shipped in anything other than perfect condition. The players are assembled by an ISO9001 compliant company who most definitely will not have attempted a bodge repair - especially on a plastic panel of which we have hundreds of spares. Please go ahead and send that photo, and we'll send out a replacement fascia if that's what you need.

I'm not sure what problems you see with the Linux software - it's kept up to date and we get good feedback about it. A command line driven utility is what has been demanded of us, so people can interface it into their Perl scripts, automate uploads and that kind of thing. The utility is supplied as an x86 binary as well as source.

If you want a GUI front end then the best bet is currently Jempeg - a Java implementation of emplode which runs on just about every platform going. It is currently in Beta release, but when it makes Gold we will include it on the CD and link from our web site. (right now you can find the project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jempeg/). There are other Linux GUI downloader projects in progress as well, but I don't believe they're as far advanced as the Java version. Our geek site (http://geek.empeg.com) will track the progress of these projects (admittedly it's overdue an update right now).

Earlier in the year we took the step of releasing the download source under GPL, recognising that we don't have the resources to develop downloaders for a wide variety of platforms. The commercial reality for us is that 90%+ of our userbase demand Windows software, and this is where we must focus our attention (especially as we are now owned by S3 / SONICblue). Nonetheless I feel that we have given a huge amount of work to the Linux community - including much effort fixing up the StrongARM/Cirrus kernels for small footprint embedded applications, providing a general purpose in-dash Linux platform, and providing GPL code for accessing the music database. In addition our developers spend a great deal of time discussing technical issues at the empeg BBS (http://empeg.comms.net) which includes many Linux related topics.

Regards

Rob
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Rob Voisey, empeg Operations Manager
e: [email protected] t: +44 1223 576123 f: +44 1223 576124