I'm going to assume that you have a brand new Rio - if you bought a second hand empeg player many of my comments would be different.

> the manual that ships with the Empeg _sucks_

Not a comment we hear often, but I suspect most of our owners don't even bother to read the manual. I'm glad someone has.

> The online manual in Emplode and the written manual differ a lot

Emplode has been re-written from scratch, as has the electronic help content - release 2.0 due for public beta late Q3.

> Make Emplode itself and the manuals etc be online updateable

Already in 2.0. It will check for new firmware as well.

> The usability of Emplode is uhm, well, down to a minimum

Emplode 2.0 is a very different animal.

> The IR remote is really bad

The Rio one? It's a custom remote (we used to ship a similar Kenwood part) which is of a similar format to many in-car remote controls. Do you want to pick out some specific illogical elements? Can't say I've had a problem with it (although it took a while to relearn as I was used to the Kenwood).

> the left/right/down keys and the knob have duplicated functions

Pressing the knob was never intended to bring up menus - this was a quick hack to get it doing something for 1.0. The intended functionality is for the knob to navigate sound related options, but there have been several wishlist suggestions that we will consider before releasing 2.0.

> Whenever you're adjusting the volume, you first have to exit the volume control screen before you
> can change the track

Already fixed in 2.0.

> You've got such a huge screen, use it!

I think even 1.0 makes pretty good use of the screen - 2.0 shows even more information. I get the impression it's the menus you have the biggest problem with - we're planning to move to something radically different around the end of this year (that won't make 2.0 though).

> for some reason if I use files encoded with variable bitrate the skip forward/skip backward function
> doesn't work anymore

Fixed in 2.0. We moved to ARM CODEC's, which as well as supporting VBR properly, also support WMA and WAV playback. By the way, track skipping in VBR with 1.0 is dependent on the encoder you used - I think there's a FAQ for it.

Thanks for the feedback, I hope 2.0 will address most of your concerns.

Rob