Hi all,

Like a few others here, I'm about to embark on a re-ripping project to bring my collection up to snuff (not to mention, up to date, since half my stuff isn't ripped to begin with). A lot of my stuff was ripped before I settled on LAME with 192 (or 256) VBR. Before I start, I was thinking about ripping to Ogg. Sadly, I don't have the space available to store everything in FLAC to reconvert at will, so I don't want to re-rip only to re-rip yet again, later on.

So, my question... what's the state of Ogg on the Empeg? I've done a bit of browsing through other threads, but just to confirm, Ogg requires v3alpha8, which may, or may not have issues. Are the issues reasonable to put up with, just for the Ogg support? You may assume that, on uploading new tunes, all I want to do is use jEmplode, and no futzing beyond that (a one-time initialization type futzing is okay, though). Does the alpha seriously break anything from 2.0final?

Also (and I may be entirely out in left field on this one), is the MP3 decoding done via software or hardware, and, if the latter, does using Ogg, rather than MP3, cause any significant impact on CPU/RAM usage?

And, finally, a poll to satisfy curiosity...