I'm not 100 percent certain of all of those behaviors in that particular beta version. I wonder if there's a copy of that beta floating around. I don't think I kept betas that old.

I'd really like to know more about why you want to know this. Are you seriously talking about overturning Creative's patent? If so, more power to ya, and I'm sure everyone here would love to help.

So, the answers to the questions I do know authoritatively are:

Quote:
Did the Mk1 software circa Sept. 1999 permit you to navigate hierarchical playlists the same way as was done in the Mk2?

Yes. Aside from the "Enqueue" feature (hold down the button to enqueue a track/playlist, press it to play the track/playlist), the way you navigated the hierarchy of playlists was identical to the way it's done in the current software. It hasn't changed.

Quote:
In 1999, did you implement multiple levels of nested playlists, including genre, artist, album, and tracks within an album playlist?

At that time, the playlists were arbitrarily named, by the user. They *could* be genre, artist, album, etc., but they didn't have to be. I know that I named my playlists that way from the very beginning, but those names could have been anything. My hierarchy could have been:

Foo
Bar
Yada
Yada

Or it could have been:

Progressive Rock
Rush
Moving Pictures
Tom Sawyer

Both were possible.

Quote:
Physically, how did you navigate down each level of nested playlist, and what did the empeg display show at each level?

Exactly the same as you do today.

- Menu/OK/downarrow opens the menu.
- Menu/OK/downarrow selects "playlists".
- Left/Right scrolls the playlists.
- Menu/OK/downarrow selects that playlist.
- Repeat the last two steps until you're in whatever playlist you want to play.
- Menu/OK/downarrow (on the triangular PLAY icon) plays that playlist.

Quote:
At the lowest level, could you directly select a particular track to play, and if so, how?.

Yes. If you reached a playlist where the children are just a bunch of songs (say, an album playlist), it simply shows you all the song titles, and you can select and play individual songs. Or, you could press the triangle "play" icon to play all of them.

If you reach a playlist that is a mixture of loose songs and additional sub-playlists, one of the items available to select is a musical note icon that represents the loose songs in that playlist. Pressing Menu/OK/downarrow on that musical note icon gives you the list of loose songs.

Quote:
Can anyone direct me to a user guide/manual for the Mk1 that showed how to navigate among playlists?

That one, I don't know. Perhaps the Empeg/Rio guys will be able to supply you with an old PDF or something. They'll probably want to talk to you in more detail to find out more about exactly what your little project is.