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I have to confess to being somewhat disappointed in your post. First off: I organise the Amersfoort events for fun, plain and simple. In order to make it sucessful, I have to make it attractive enough for people to want to attend. Don't forget, I am in competition with TV, football matches, F1 races, and, believe it or not, exams and even national holidays!


Rob, I'm truly sorry my post upset you. I had not intended to make it seem as if I was slamming the Amersfoort meets, nor do I believe anything I said in my post should lead one to believe that was my intention. Even though I've not been, I can tell from the posts / stories how much fun they are....

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Thanks to the good graces of the empeg team, one of the pulling points so far has been new builds of software for the player.


Of course. And that has been appropriate.

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However - and bear this in mind - this is software produced in their own time, for an unsupported product.


This is, of course, a well understood fact.

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I rather resent the imputation that you feel that the people who come here have formed a cliquey "club" just because they can afford the ticket price and the cost: that's not the case.


And I rather resent having it implied that I said things I did not. What I said was:

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First, the "circle-of-friends" thing would have to come to a dead stop. If I put down currency to help development, I wouldn't want to be told "well, you weren't at the meet, so ha ha ha. Just wait 6 months." Yes, I know it was to keep peoples decks from getting pooched. Yes, I know nobody was paying at the time. My point is that if I do pay, I want to get releases (alphas, too) as soon as anyone else. Period. I'm a big boy and can take responsibility for screwing up my player if it comes to that. But I won't pay to be made feel like I'm second tier because I can't afford to take time off of school and fly to Europe for fun.



Nowhere there do I make mention of a "cliquey club". Perhaps I was not clear enough, but the "circle-of-friends" comment referred to Rob's order that the Amersfoort Alpha could be shared with your friends in person, but not online. So I'm sorry if you're upset by my pointing it out, but it did indeed become a "circle-of-friends" thing, in the form of PM'd download locations, etc. The threads are there to back up what I'm saying. And my whole point was not arguing about what has happened, but instead detailing as what I could see as issues with paid development.

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You are also quite welcome to come as well. If you have problems with the date of the 2005 event (are you looking at the calender?) due to exams, then let me know NOW and I'll see if I can adjust it - I have done this for several people several times now to make sure that as many people as want to come, can come. Money a problem? Well, I can't help much with that I'm afraid - but I do try to make it fun for everyone who can't attend, even going so far as trying to arrange webcams at the event, and this year an attempt was made at videoing it for a limited "Best of..". For various reasons this hasn't happened - sorry.


No apology necessary. And thank you for the invitation, though I never felt like I was unwelcome. Finances and schedule simply do not allow it. But my point was that with paid development, I think that "Meet Only" releases would have to stop. While making attending a meet a requirement to get early access to an Alpha works in the unpaid model, it becomes harder to convince people that they should wait longer than others for something they've also paid for.

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I realise that at each event, there has been a fair amount of post-event ragging about these releases with an "We know something you don't know!" element to it. Perhaps this is a mistake - but it's only ragging, nothing else! There's nothing intentionally nasty about it!


This is exactly what I was talking about. No, it wasn't nasty, but it got pretty old after a month or two. And if people are paying, it would have to stop.

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To labour this point somewhat - when I made this current proposal, I was NOT proposing that partially-directed versions be released to a limited crowd who have paid to "join the club". This was the last thing on my mind. The proposal was going to be firmed up along the lines that the people who paid up front would be entitled to regular updates during development, intermediate test builds, so forth - to act as a kind of voluntary A-test team, much the way as I did with the original release test team.


I agree, 100%. And it's exactly what I said in my post, admittedly not as clearly. I was trying to get across the idea that the determiner would now have to be did you pay for development rather than did you attend Amersfoort.

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Then eventually, everyone - having paid or not - would benefit from a free, Beta upgrade. So why pay at all, then? Why not just sit back and wait for a new sausage to pop out of the pipe? Well, that's what's been happeniing so far (with diminishing frequency), in case you haven't noticed - and the people who have benefitted from this approach have been ...

...yup, you guessed it, the people who came to the Amersfoort meets. And yes, some of them DID pay - like Rob Riccardelli who paid a h*** of a lot in air fare to come over for what was, in the end, just a boozy party with a few hamburgers thrown in for good measure! Does that not sound like "paying" for a priviledged release? It was his choice to do so, nicht wahr?


Indeed it does. Ibid.

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I am also a little bothered that you have attached conditions to what you are prepared to contribute to. While I understand why you want what you want, you are - as other posters here are also doing - Completely Missing The Point. I am Not talking about, nor am I interested in doing, (in a limited time with limited funds) adding new functionality , only making what has been described as an unstable release into a Stable one, with a pre-selected list of fixes to certain bugs that will provide the maximum benefit to the entire user community. If you wish to be partial, and only contribute to directed development that benefits only yourself and no-one else (I don't see anyone else clamouring for Japanese ID3 support here - do you?), then I would prefer that you withdrew and did not offer funds as I will not be able to do what you ask - there won't be the opportunity. Sure, there are about a dozen new things I would like to build into the the player software but I will have neither the time, nor funds to do this.


I'm sorry if it bothers you that I don't feel like paying for a lot of features I don't have a need for out of some altruistic sense of community duty. And I'm sorry I've missed the point. If fixing bugs in 3.0 is the key, I'm out; I don't listen to the radio, and it's not worth a lot of money to me to have crossfading. And I'm also sorry for wanting something that's very important to me added in. But me being sorry isn't going to make me stop wanting it, especially given the rumors, as I said, of it having already been done before.

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I suspect saying it this way will upset you: I sincerely hope not, as I do not wish for this to happen - your posts and contributions on this board are enjoyable and I enjoy reading your thoughts. But as you say yourself - I have to be brutal about this: I will have very little time to do what I propose. I am not even sure I will be able to do enough: I will be taking a huge financial risk on your behalf and to be anything less than totally focussed on what is practically achievable is without any doubt in my mind, POINTLESS.


Not upset at all, and thank you very much for the kind words. But as I said, bug fixes to correct problems with something I don't use is a bit of a hard sell.

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If you all want this to happen, then you have a very small window of opportunity to consider what you want, pool your funds, and make a concrete contribution, for which I promise you will be rewarded with my greatest efforts. But if it's not important enough for you - well, why should I commit to the risk?




I think you're 100% right. I think now is the time for everyone to put up or shut up. Perhaps Drakino could set something up so that the next time each member visits the boards, they first have to vote at to whether or not they would be interested in contributing. Then there will be no more question.

Rob, just let me say that I have a great deal of respect for you, both in general as well as for what you are attempting to do. As I'm sure everybody here does as well. Please don't forget that. And thank you for all the effort. I sincerely hope my comments didn't imply anything different.
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Dave