Greetings!

I have been mostly lurking or offline completely over the holidays. But this thread caught my attention. It sounds as if there have been some shifts in the way Rio looks (well, looked) at the empeg car customer base as a trial community for experimental features. I know that it has really been the folks @ empeg (current and former) that have been pushing this. Given that people have been moving on and away from Rio, I suspect that the management (term used in a very sarcastic manner) have lost site of the value of their own customer base and user community. Sad.

But if the code will not be developed any further, I doubt any amount that could be raised (and I am willing to kick in for this too) would be enough to even get Rio's attention to allow for use of the existing code tree, still under their control.

As for third party player work, that is always a possibility. The strength of the player has always been leading edge (for its time) hardware combined with extremely powerful software. I am not sure how easy it would be to replicate this, even with basic features, to give a stable application. I am not a coder, but I certainly would not mind trying to fund someone to find out...

While there are certainly some features I would like to see in a final (or even a stable beta) version, I have not loaded 3.0 because I prefer the rock solid stability of 2.01 over having to worry about / tinker with / avoid crashes while listening and driving. If I had a wish list of what I would like to see from 3.0 stable enough to have for a new release, I would say sync with emplode and crossfading would be my two highest priorities.

I guess this just turns out to be a long-winded "me too" message...