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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.

I don't think there's been any such "move away"; it's true that Rob did sell upper management on using the empeg-car alpha group as a great testbed for some of the early audio path testing, but there's never been explicit authorisation for people to work on carplayer code in work hours - the fact that the carplayer and current/future Rio products use the same code does mean that regular builds pop out of autobuilders which compile and link for the carplayer. Just because Rob isn't at empeg anymore doesn't mean this stops happening, or people stop caring about the carplayer.

The challenge is always to take one of these and do the necessary fixes in order to result in a player that's actually *usable* - in the process of adding some feature not applicable to the carplayer, a carplayer feature can get broken. There's also the issue of UI - the carplayer UI is seriously creaking under the weight of Karma features which aren't accessible in an obvious manner, and really needs to be ripped up & redone. Some of this may become easier from further abstraction and tidying of the code, but it could well result in no carplayer builds working at all until somebody rewrites the UI from scratch, for example.

Several empeg guys, including notably Peter and JohnG, have most recently put in stirling work on v3 and helped immensely with getting it usable, but it is very much a labour of love.

The way to really get something state of the art is to have a new car product, which isn't a stupid an idea as it might seem. By my calculations....

Hugo