First off, I disagree with your statement that keeping the playlist separate from the music is a good idea. Let's say you have a 36GB Empeg and you fill it up with your music, but keep your original rips on a desktop HD (or CDR's) for safe keeping (smart move!). Three months later you have some kind of hard disk failure or corruption which causes a loss of your files. If the keywords are embedded in the ID3 tag (like Artist, Title, etc. currently are) then you just transfer the files. If not, then you spend HOURS re-creating your playlists with minute mouse movements in Emplode. This is the whole reason Emplode imports Artist, Title, Genre, Source, and Year from the ID3. I just wanted to take it one step further and have it use some more ID3 information, and allow them to be used in combination instead of just selecting on one.

I also don't see how sharing Empeg playlists would help anyone. No two of us have the same music, and playlists are just pointers to FIDs, right? FIDs aren't globally unique... I don't think sharing of Empeg playlists is feasible or even useful.

Beyond the fact that the keywords are safely stored in the MP3 file, you have so much more flexibility. Currently you can do an "OR" (union) operation with "search by" results (append), but you can't do it with playlists (at least I don't think so. Selecting a playlist still replaces the currently playing songs, right?) An "AND" (intersect) operation simply doesn't exist for either playlists or searches. I thought I heard they were going to add "append playlist" to 1.1, but that doesn't solve the problem of when you want to select songs that have two or more properties in combination.

Here's another example. You've got 500 rap tunes, 300 rock tunes, and an overlap of 50 that would be considered both (Run DMC / Aerosmith's "Walk This Way", the Judgement Night soundtrack, etc.) With playlists, in order to hear this intersection of rock and rap, you'd have to make a separate playlist for all those songs. With what I'm talking about, just key in "rock AND rap" and you've got it. Then you're free to combine any other keywords you're using to produce a large number of playlists dynamically.

I really started thinking about this when I realized that categorizing my collection by genre was not only time-consuming, but ineffective. You're forced to set up your mood playlists ahead of time, rather than constructing them on the fly by giving a few attributes or keywords. With this kind of setup, you could tag a song as "rock", "rap", "heavy", "fast", "loud", "live", "accoustic", "instrumental" or whatever.

By the way, I realize the value of playlists, and am not suggesting the playlist structure go away. I realize that there are many times where you'll want to keep a group of tunes together in a single list, and not worry about them sharing a source or keyword or artist. But I think adding this flexible search feature would be a big win.

And seriously, all the drag and dropping of playlists in Emplode is bound to cause some RSI... :)

-Tony
MkII #554